How to proof that Ubicomp solutions are valid?

Over the last years there have been many workshops and sessions in the ubicomp community that address the evaluation of systems. At Pervasive 2005 in Munich I co-organized a workshop on Application led research with George Coulouris and others. For me one of the central outcomes was that we – as ubicomp researchers – need to team up in evaluating our technologies and solutions with experts in the application domain and that we stay involved in this part of the research. Just handing it over for evaluation into the other domain will not bring us the insights we need to move the field forward. There is a workshop report which appeared in the IEEE Pervasive Magazine, that discusses the topic in more detail [1].

On Friday I met we a very interesting expert in the domain of gerontology. Elisabeth Steinhagen-Thiessen is chief consultant and director of the protestant geriatric centre of Berlin and professor of internal medicine/gerontology at the Charite in Berlin. We talked about opportunities for activity recognition in this domain and discussed potential set-ups for studies.

[1] Richard Sharp, Kasim Rehman. What Makes Good Application-led Research? IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazin. Volume 4, Number 3. July-September 2005.