Conceptually Advancing “Application Mobility” Towards Design

Abstract

Mobility has become an omnipresent part of our modern IT society. Alongside the general mobility taxonomy of mobile users, terminals, sessions and services, there are also more specialized forms of mobility. Context Awareness Supported Application Mobility (CASAM) or “Application Mobility” is one such form that is explored in this paper. CASAM builds on the idea of using context to move an application between different devices during its execution, in order to provide relevant information and/or services. In this article we use a concept-driven approach to advance mobile systems research, integrating it with a more traditional user-centric method and a case study, further exploring the concept of CASAM. To empirically situate our design work we conducted an empirical study of a home care service group serving the Swedish municipality of Skellefteå, followed by an exercise in matching the properties of the CASAM concept in relation to problems within current workflow (e.g. scheduling, travel, care situation, communication and debriefing). The result is a proposal for an IT artifact manifesting the CASAM concept, attending to all the identified problems while at the same time validating the concept.