Nokia Morph

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

. During the following ten years mobile communication and the Internet will converge into a global information platform. Mobile phones have already become an enabling platform for digital services and applications. Mobile phones are powerful multimedia computers with wide range of functionality, e.g., imaging, navigation, music, content management, browsing,

Email and time management. Increasingly they will have advanced multi-access communication, information processing, multimedia, mass storage and multimodal user interface capabilities. In the continuation these trusted personal devices will also have new capabilities, illustrated in Fig.1:

Fig. 1. Sensing, computing and communication platform based on mobile devices as gateways between local and global information

• Interacting with local environment via embedded short range radios, sensors, cameras, and audio functionality.

• Functioning both as servers for global and local internet services and as clients for global internet services.

• Serving as gateways that connect local information and global internet based services.

• Carrying the digital identity of the user and enabling easy to-use secure communication and controlled privacy in future smart spaces.

• Sensing local context and the behavior of its user.

Context awareness, including location, is the fundamental underlying capability of the future mobile devices. These context sensitive devices will open wide range of solutions for Internet services and mobile communication. Sensors, positioning and powerful signal processing embedded in mobile devices make it possible to detect, observe and follow different events and patterns in user’s behavior and surrounding environments with precise location. Mobile device becomes a cognitive user interface that is continuously connected to the local environment and to the Internet services. Context awareness has also profound influence on the development of future...