Middleware Design and Human Factor

Abstract

Our future daily lives will be augmented by various computers and sensors, and our environments change their behavior according to the current situation. Each person will have many personal devices such as celluar phones, PDA's, MP3 Players voice recorders. Also, many appliances will be available near us such as various displays, televisions, and information kiosk. We believe that these devices and appliances are communicated in a spontaneous way, and provide useful information to us. It is important to offer middleware infrastructures to hide a variety of complexities from application programmers to make easy to develop pervasive computing applications. However, we have not enough experiences how to build middleware for pervasive computing, and it is important to share knowledge among research communities. In this paper, we present three middleware infrastructures for pervasive computing, that have been developed in our projects. These middleware infrastructures hide various complexities such as context-awareness to make it easy to develop pervasive computing applications. We found that hiding context-awareness requires to take into account human factors when designing middleware. We show the overview of our middlewares, and discuss some human factor issues while designing our middlewares.