Towards Useful and Usable Services in Personal Networks

Abstract

A lot of research and development is going into overcoming the technological hurdles of realizing ubiquitous computing in personal networks. For this endeavor to become successful it is essential that useful and usable services are developed to ensure acceptance of the new PN paradigm. This paper discusses the importance of involving end-users in the development process and presents a concrete approach to do this. A case study is made on the development and evaluation of a prototype service for monitoring and managing diabetes. Although it is designed as a PN based service relying on technology still under development, it has been implemented using current networking and communication technologies and tested with end-users