Matt Stabeler

Had a quick chat with Aaron about the survey I am planning, and he suggested picking out a number of busy job types, where people are very mobile (i.e. travelling etc, not just at home with a laptop), and trying to show that somehow using ambient/pervasive technology would improve some aspect of their job – e.g. improved productivity by 5% or whatever – or perhaps a nurse in hospital having an ambient monitor about her person that keeps a track of patients condition.

Also suggested jumping people and asking them about their devices power and usage –

How much power does it have (without looking)? Why do you think that? what applications have been running?

Also talked about opportunistic annexing – using devices to interact with the environment – much like the personal server (Trevor Pering et al)

I’ve been looking at how things like processing power, battery life, and communication bandwidth affect a user on a day to day basis, and have trying to find studies that have measured these things, without success. 

I am planning to do a quick and dirty user study to find out mobile usage patterns: More specifically – 

What sort of devices do users own, what do they use them for, what types of users can we define, what are users familliar with, etc.

Out of this I hope to show that we do not need to optimise for battery power, communications bandwidth is sufficient for most day to day tasks, and that processing power is abundant.