The IST Integrated Project MobiLife for mobile applications and services research was launched in September 2004. MobiLife consists of a consortium of 22 organisations from 9 countries. The consortium comprises manufacturers, operators, solution providers, SMEs and academia. The project is scheduled to run over a period of 28 months until the end of 2006, with total EU funding support of up to 9.7 million € (total budget 17.3 million €).

MobiLife is part of a larger project cluster Wireless World Initiative (WWI). WWI contains a series of large Integrated Projects in FP6-IST covering a broad range of research topics for the development of wireless communication technologies for systems beyond 3G.

Approach and Methodology

MobiLife addresses the multi-dimensional diversity in end-user devices, available networks, interaction modes, applications, and services. To deal with this complexity and to reach its strategic goal, MobiLife researches with a user-centric approach context-awareness, privacy and trust, adaptation, semantic interoperability, and their embodiment in novel services and applications matching key use scenarios of everyday life.

Methodologically, the project follows an interactive approach that acknowledges that the user requirements must be learned partially from experiments with novel service and application prototypes illustrating the end-user value and possibilities of new enabling technologies.

User Research

One of the main achievements of the user-centric work in MobiLife has been in the coordination and application of the user-centric approach in applications and services requirements collection process as well as in influencing the applications and services development process.

MobiLife organised and co-organised 3 workshops in Finland , France and Germany in spring-fall 2004 to collect requirements and views from different stakeholders (end-users, manufacturers, operators, service providers, regulators, etc.) to guide the work in MobiLife.

Later on, MobiLife has conducted user studies with multiple families in Finland and Italy on October-November 2004 and on April-May 2005 to get feedback for applications and services scenarios to drive the technology and application work.

Technologies and Architecture

MobiLife has worked on and experimented with novel views on multi-modality, personalisation, privacy & trust, and context technologies and mechanisms to fit into a common Reference Model.

The consolidated MobiLife Reference Model identifies the essential functional blocks for the realisation of new mobile service and applications. The goal is to provide a reference model that provides service developers an environment to realise mobile communication services that follow the trend of the pervasive computing paradigm.

The MobiLife Context Management Framework (CMF) represents the MobiLife approach to discovery of, exchange of, and reasoning with context information, in such a way that context information can easily flow from one provider to multiple consumer, and from multiple providers to one consumer. The MobiLife CMF is an enabling technology for a wide range of context-aware MobiLife applications that are aware of the user's (or group's) context and proactively adapt to it.

These and related work have been consolidated into collections of functional/technical requirements, specifications and architecture/component frameworks.

Applications

In parallel to the technology work, MobiLife is developing a set of applications - e.g., Wellness-Aware Multi-Modal Gaming - matching to the user-centric scenarios. These applications show what will be enabled by the technologies developed, but are also driving the research. The applications are developed in several stages and at each stage they are tested with actual users. The results of these tests will be taken into account not only in the application development but also in the technology work.

These and related work have been consolidated into applications and services mock-ups as well as specifications. The results are demonstrated in public events.

Outlook

We expect that the technologies from MobiLife will influence the further development of Mobile Applications. For example, there is the possibility to include a context-awareness servers (CAS) into the 3GPP IMS system.

S. Gessler, K. Jesse, Advanced Location Modeling to enable sophisticated LBS Provisioning in 3G networks. In: Beigl, M.; Gray, P.; Salber, D. (Hrsg.): Proceedings of the Workshop on Location Modeling for Ubiquitous Computing. Atlanta , USA 2001.

S. Gessler, S. Weiss , M. Martin, Context-awareness in future life scenarios: Impact on service provisioning platforms, Saint Workshop, February 2005.

E. Kovacs, S.Gessler, M. Martin, Impact of Context-Aware Services on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), WWRF#14, San Diego, May 2005.

M. Martin, P. Nurmi, J. Flanagan, Enabling proactiveness through Context Prediction, CAPS 2005, Helsinki , June 2005.

M. Martin, P. Nurmi, A Generic Large Scale Simulator for Ubiquitous Computing (Poster& Demonstration), 3rd Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networks and Services (MobiQuitous 2006), San Jose, California, July 2006.

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