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Agile environmental monitoring is a novel style of environmental-monitoring development that lets you rapidly develop sensor devices and monitoring systems through trial and error during continuous sensing. The authors developed three environmental-monitoring systems and adapted them in situ based on actual field requirements. This article is part of a special issue on smart cities.

For protecting the public health, many research groups have tried to capture dense air quality information using sensorized vehicles that travel within urban areas. However, it remains difficult to accumulate real-time and fine-grained air quality information to fulfill a wide variety of requests from citizens and authorities. In this paper, we propose on-demand urban air quality monitoring using public vehicles. By adapting the monitoring behavior of sensors to each city's individual's needs, smart cities can accumulate enough air quality information with just a few sensorized vehicles. This paper describes the mechanisms of remote update programs on sensor nodes mounted on public vehicles for on-demand monitoring. We adopted the mechanisms on sensorized public vehicles in Fujisawa City, Japan. The paper also reports our air quality monitoring field trial and describes a functional design for on-demand air quality monitoring.

PurposeIn ubiquitous computing environments, not only programmers but also general users come to develop/customize applications. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a new application development environment for ubiquitous computing environments.Design/methodology/approachThe paper clarifies the requirements for application development environments of ubiquitous computing environments. It then designs and implements a prototype of a development environment that fulfills these requirements.FindingsIt is found that the requirements for application development in ubiquitous computing environments are: easy programming, detection of current status, programming awareness of network connections between multiple ubiquitous devices, and debugging with cooperation among real/virtual environments.Research limitations/implicationsThis prototype of application development environment is designed for event‐driven ubiquitous devices.Practical implicationsA prototype development environment has been implemented to show the effectiveness of this approach, and is presented an example of an application development to show the effectiveness of the approach.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a new style of application development for ubiquitous computing environments

The object-blog service application automatically converts raw sensor data to environment-generated content (EGC), including texts, graphs, and figures. This conversion facilitates data searching and browsing. Generated content can serve several purposes, including memory aids, security, and communication media. In object-blog, personified objects automatically post entries to a Weblog about sensor data obtained from sensors attached to the objects. Feedback thus far from participants working with object-blog in an experimental environment has been positive.

In a ubiquitous computing environment, small computers attached to physical objects are required to send sensor data to many other nodes on a narrowband wireless network to provide various types of context-aware services. To reduce the cost of sending sensor data, this paper proposes a notation to indicate a pair of objects to share data with each other, based on the 'contact' relation between objects. We call this notation, contact-based notation (CbN). In our method, because each node can send data only to nodes contacting the node physically based on the notation, we can reduce both the distance between nodes and the amount of nodes to which to send data. Moreover, this paper describes an experiment conducted to examine the communication costs on each sensor node described in our proposed notation. The results show that the cost of our method is lower than the cost of the simple broadcasting method.

In the near future, small ubiquitous devices will be embedded into most of artifacts to support human dailylife. In such environments, we need multiple types of human-computer interfaces for enjoying ubiquitous services. This paper describes several ubiquitous gadgets; ubiquitous chip, Pin&Play, and VCC, to provide flexible ubiquitous services and user interfaces. The integrative use of these devices achieves the physical and intuitive interaction between users and ubiquitous services.

In this paper, we propose a new ubiquitous computing environment composed by visual markers and event-driven compact devices. We employ the VCC (visual computer communication) method, which we have already proposed as an information displaying method for visual markers. In the VCC method, a marker is composed of multiple tiles whose color changes at a certain interval of time, by which the marker can send dozens of bytes of information. In our research, to enhance the facility of VCC markers, we use rule-based compact devices to process various types of data and to change information shown in a VCC marker dynamically. The combination of VCC markers and compact devices enables various services such as the presentation of real-world information collected by compact devices and control of appliances via compact devices.

In this paper, we propose a new network topology discovery mechanism among ubiquitous chips, which are rule-based, event-driven input/output (I/O) control devices to compose ubiquitous computing environments. Since they achieve flexibility by describing behavior in a set of rules, we employ a rule-based approach to discover network topology. In ubiquitous computing environments, we use various communication methods and applications at the same time. Therefore, our flexible discovery mechanism works well in ubiquitous computing environments. Moreover, we verified our algorithm by implementing it on a topology discovery simulator and actual prototype devices of ubiquitous chips.

Because of the recent development of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies, various systems for RFID tags have been proposed. Since RFID tags only have a simple function, i.e., sending data, they can be available for various purposes. Accordingly, by customizing RFID tag systems, we can expand their applications. However, previous systems have been usually proposed for one special purpose only. In this paper, we propose a rule-based RFID tag system using ubiquitous chips. Our previously proposed ubiquitous chips are rule-based I/O control devices. By applying rule-based principles, we can easily customize the RFID tag system and can construct flexible, scalable, and easy exploitable systems.

In this paper, we propose an application development environment for the ubiquitous chip, which is a rule-based event-driven input/output (I/O) control device for constructing ubiquitous computing environments. The proposed development environment simulates the behaviors of multiple ubiquitous chips and helps users to create rules. Moreover, it has a function for developing applications by cooperation between virtual ubiquitous chips and real ubiquitous chips. The application environment enables both programmers and general users to develop and customize applications for ubiquitous computing environments.

People pay attention to fashion for various reasons. Wearable devices are useful in making fashion more expressive, especially by using LEDs, which can dynamically change their color or brightness using logic circuits or microcomputers. In this paper, we describe our design of prototype accessories, which use LEDs controlled via ultrasonic communication. The paper further reports a fashion show using the prototype accessories to make their usefulness clear.

In this paper, we propose a new framework for ubiquitous computing by rule-based, event-driven I/O (input/output) control devices. Our approach is flexible and autonomous because it employs a behavior-description language based on ECA (Event, Condition, Action) rules with simple I/O control functions. We have implemented a prototype ubiquitous device with connectors and several sensors to show the effectiveness of our approach.