Pervasive Computing (ubiquitous computing)
This definition is part of our
Essential Guide: IoT analytics guide: Understanding Internet of Things
data
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
Pervasive computing, also called
ubiquitous computing, is the growing trend of embedding computational
capability (generally in the form of microprocessors)
into everyday objects to make them effectively communicate and perform useful
tasks in a way that minimizes the end user's need to interact with computers as
computers. Pervasive computing devices are network-connected and constantly
available.
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Unlike desktop computing, pervasive computing
can occur with any device,
at any time, in any place and in any data
format across any network,
and can hand tasks from one computer to another as, for example, a user moves
from his car to his office. Thus, pervasive computing devices have evolved to
include not only laptops,
notebooks
and smartphones,
but also tablets,
wearable
devices, fleet management and pipeline components, lighting systems,
appliances and sensors,
and so on.
The goal of pervasive computing is to make
devices "smart," thus creating a sensor network capable of collecting,
processing and sending data, and, ultimately, communicating as a means to adapt
to the data's context and activity; in essence, a network that can understand
its surroundings and improve the human experience and quality of life.
Often considered the successor to mobile
computing, ubiquitous computing and, subsequently, pervasive computing,
generally involve wireless
communication and networking technologies, mobile devices, embedded
systems, wearable computers, RFID
tags, middleware
and software agents. Internet
capabilities, voice
recognition and artificial
intelligence are often also included.
Pervasive computing applications can cover
energy, military, safety, consumer, healthcare, production and logistics.
An example of pervasive computing is an Apple
Watch informing a user of a phone call and allowing him to complete the
call through the watch. Or, when a registered user for Amazon's
streaming music service asks her Echo device to play a song, and the song is
played without any other user intervention.
History
of ubiquitous/pervasive computing
Ubiquitous computing was first pioneered at
the Olivetti Research Laboratory in Cambridge England, where the Active Badge,
a "clip-on computer" the size of an employee ID card, was created,
enabling the company to track the location of people in a building, as well as
the objects to which they were attached.
Largely considered the father of ubiquitous
computing, Mark Weiser and colleagues at Xerox PARC soon
thereafter began building early incarnations of ubiquitous computing devices in
the form of "tabs," "pads" and "boards."
Weiser described ubiquitous computing:
Inspired by the social scientists,
philosophers and anthropologists at PARC,
we have been trying to take a radical look at what computing and networking
ought to be like. We believe that people live through their practices and tacit
knowledge, so that the most powerful things are those that are effectively invisible
in use. This is a challenge that affects all of computer science. Our
preliminary approach: Activate the world. Provide hundreds of wireless
computing devices per person per office of all scales (from 1" displays to
wall-sized). This has required new work in operating systems, user interfaces,
networks, wireless, displays and many other areas. We call our work
"ubiquitous computing." This is different from PDAs [personal digital
assistants], Dynabooks or information at your fingertips. It is invisible,
everywhere computing that does not live on a personal
device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere.
He later wrote:
For 30 years, most interface design,
and most computer design, has been headed down the path of the
"dramatic" machine. Its highest ideal is to make a computer so
exciting, so wonderful, so interesting, that we never want to be without it. A
less-traveled path I call the "invisible": its highest ideal is to
make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without
even thinking about it. (I have also called this notion "ubiquitous
computing," and have placed its origins in postmodernism.) I believe that,
in the next 20 years, the second path will come to dominate. But this will not
be easy; very little of our current system's infrastructure
will survive. We have been building versions of the infrastructure-to-come at
PARC for the past four years in the form of inch-, foot- and yard-sized
computers we call tabs, pads and boards. Our prototypes have sometimes
succeeded, but more often failed to be invisible. From what we have learned, we
are now exploring some new directions for ubicomp, including the famous
"dangling string" display.
The term pervasive computing followed in
the late 1990s, largely popularized by the creation of IBM's
pervasive computing division. Though synonymous today, Professor Friedemann
Mattern of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich noted in a 2004
paper that:
Weiser saw the term "ubiquitous
computing" in a more academic and idealistic sense as an unobtrusive,
human-centric technology vision that will not be realized for many years, yet
[the] industry has coined the term "pervasive computing" with a
slightly different slant. Though this also relates to pervasive and omnipresent
information processing, its primary goal is to use this information processing
in the near future in the fields of electronic
commerce and web-based business processes. In this pragmatic
variation -- where wireless communication plays an important role alongside
various mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs -- ubiquitous computing is
already gaining a foothold in practice.
Pervasive
computing and the internet of things
The internet
of things (IoT) has largely evolved out of pervasive computing. Though
some argue there is little or no difference, IoT is likely more in line with
pervasive computing rather than Weiser's original view of ubiquitous computing.
Like pervasive computing, IoT-connected
devices communicate and provide notifications about usage. The vision of
pervasive computing is computing power widely dispersed throughout daily life
in everyday objects. The internet of things is on its way to providing this
vision and turning common objects into connected devices, yet, as of now,
requires a great deal of configuration and human interaction -- something
Weiser's ubiquitous computing does not.
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