SensAid Pad: Supporting Context-Aware Information Navigation

Designing and implementing ubiquitous information systems presents new challenges to software engineering. These systems have to integrate a variety of components representing both hardware and software to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds, while being expandable and robust. This paper presents our experiences in building a ubiquitous contextaware information system, the SensAid Pad. A component-oriented research system with tools to facilitate the construction of physical information navigation scenarios. It integrates hardware sensors with the notion of context and tokens, together with simple yet powerful graphical user-oriented tools in a prototyping system.