Supporting impromptu service discovery and access in heterogeneous assistive environments

Wireless hotspots are permeating the globe bringing interesting services and spontaneous connectivity to mobile users. In order to enable the elderly and disabled to be fully integrated into the society, it's of paramount importance to build a pervasive assistive environment where assistive services can be automatically discovered and easily accessed with the device-to-hand across the physical spaces. In this paper, we propose a framework that can support impromptu service discovery and context-aware service access with mobile devices in heterogeneous assistive environments. Different from the existing approaches, the framework requires no specialized hardware or software installation in mobile client devices, it can automatically generate personalized user interfaces based on context such as user preference and device capability. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework, we prototyped a set of assistive services in public spaces like shopping malls, leveraging the OSGi-based platform accessible from any WLAN enabled mobile devices.