Infofield : an aura recognizing digital information of everyday environment

Abstract

Many ubiquitous computing scenarios are enabled by the ability to detect and identify objects in a user's environment, and recently Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been considered an affordable technology for providing such ability. However, RFID approaches have been flawed: when they operate at long range, they fail to provide adequate context as to which tagged objects are the subject of the user's interest; and when tuned for short range operation, they require the user to explicitly scan the tagged object. In addition, the knowledge gained from the user interacting with the object is limited to identification. This thesis proposes an ambient metaphor for detecting daily environments suitable for the upcoming far-field UHF RFID infrastructure. A user carries a mobile RFID reader, which creates a sphere of detection field to monitor RFID tags surrounding the user. The reader silently monitors the objects and functions as an agent that supports the user's consciousness of events happening outside of the user's attention. With sensor-enhanced RFID tags, our system does not limit itself to identification, but also provides the status of the corresponding item. The data from the sensors are used to distinguish a tag in a multiple tag environment and to describe the interactions between the user and the host object. This improves the selectivity and the context-awareness of the system.