Pedro Santana

Information about my research projects.

mSALSA

An agent framework for ubicomp applications.

Ubiquitous computing environments are characterized by the diversity of devices through which the mobile users can accede to information and services. SALSA middleware facilitates the development of ubicomp systems, for PDAs and Smart phones the SALSA functionality was extended implementing a sub set of classes developed in C#, this version was denominated microSALSA (mSalsa).

The users of ubicomp environments requires to transfer information of their PDA to any other device, or vice versa. In order to facilitate the implementation of this characteristic in ubiquitous computing systems, we decided to create a migration component. The base for the development of this component is mSALSA framework, which allows to create ubiquitous computing systems using autonomous agents.

Electronic Family Newspaper

Supporting Emotional Ties among Mexican Elders and Their Families Living Abroad.

Web: http://www.pecesama.net/thesis/

The aged of the population is a phenomenon that is facing many nations, such as Mexico, in which 7.5% of the population is greater than 60 years old. The current estimation for the 2030 is that it will reach a 17.5%. Among those elders, 10% of them live alone with no close family members around them. This condition is more likely to occur in some regions of Mexico as it is related with the ever increasing migration of one or more of their family's members to USA. The scenario for those elders can be quite complex as they often face the impossibility of visiting or being visited by their families as they lack of proper documentation (VISAS or residency permits).

Our work involves to strength the social family networks and context aware ubiquitous computing to provide a technological solution focusing on elder people living alone in Mexico and their families abroad. To understand the challenges and circumstances around living alone for an elder person in this situation, we conducted interviews with a group of them. Those interviews served to inform our design of a system that eases the isolation of these people.

With the Electronic Family Newspaper project, we envisioned a communication tool in the form of a family newspaper through which seniors and their relatives not only maintain close social ties by sharing information, personal reminiscences and cultural stories, but enable them to exercise their minds through its entertainment section, as it has been found that elders experience a cognitive decline as they become older.

LDIM

an Instant Messenger for Large Shared Displays

Groupware systems on large displays are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the workplace.

Hospitals are complex information-rich environments that include a significant technical and computational infrastructure; the need for coordination and collaboration among specialists with different areas of expertise; an intense information exchange; and the mobility of hospital staff, patients, documents and equipment. This makes them ideal application environments for pervasive or ubiquitous computing technology.

In our work we aimed to evaluate in a cost-effective way the core characteristics of an ubicomp environment that integrates interactive public displays and PDAs with context-aware hospital applications.

The study was conducted at IMSS General Hospital in Ensenada, Mexico. The subjects of study were 35 people, 24 were residents and the rest of them were doctors. We evaluated the acceptance and use of technology through video scenarios, which were designed as a result of a three months case of study in the same hospital. Three scenarios, showing real working situations augmented with ubicomp were produced and two of them used in the of clinical test. They all agreed that these are actual problems they face everyday and are not adequately addressed by current technologies.

EMEF

Supporting Medical Activities

Web: http://www.pecesama.net/emep/

The introduction of new Information Technology, and standards such as those proposed by the Health Level Seven (HL7), enable the interoperability between software applications from different health organizations.

SIABUC 8: Web Services

Searching and Book Reserving System

The Universidad de Colima has a library search system. However, this library search system only helps in determining whether a library has acquired an specific bibliographic material or not.

There exists a necessity of improving and integrating library search services on Internet, for instance, with the current library system, books cannot be reserved from the web and there is no way to know whether books are available or not for check out. Furtheremore, the quick grow of databases and information has created a necessity and opportunity at the same time to extract "knowledge" from these databases by using datamining techniques. In order to accomplish this objetive, we will use Web Services developed in ASP.NET by using Visual Studio .NET as our main project development tool and VB.NET as our programming language.