A unified method for services and user interfaces creation: application to persons with special needs

Abstract

This paper presents a method for both services and user interfaces design and implementation in ubiquitous environments. Communities of designers and developers think separately and generally do not converge. The proposed approach tackles context-awareness at two levels: code behind and user interface generation. Thus, it facilitates the work of designers and developers, limits incompatibility issues and supports dynamic generation of systems. After a deep analysis, we have noticed that both adaptive services and user interfaces design can follow the same creation process with respect to service validation, user and service task analysis and user requirements. Originality of our work comes from the fact that it supports content, service, behaviour and presentation adaptation. It exploits a model driven approach to consume models and semi-automatically generate codes. We benefit from the pervasive services' advantages to manage a complete application since the design phase. We present in this paper the different concepts leading to such a method, a state-of-the-art on existing approaches in the area of context-aware services and user interfaces, and a case study of a mobile application for patients in a retirement home to evaluate the usability of the proposed approach.