The application needs a little "reason and affection."

According to foreign media reports, the well-known technology blog GigaOM.com founder Om Malik (Om Malik) recently published a signed article, talked about the application developers need to change the way of thinking, make full use of mobile device sensors, the following is the full text summary:

One of the biggest oddities of my iphone (or any smartphone) is that when switching between Wi-Fi and 3G networks, the phone suddenly becomes "dementia": The data Connection presents a bizarre "dementia" state. And when a mobile phone is switched between two Wi-Fi networks, the same problem can occur: The phone can't find the strongest network, and even at the best of times, you're stuck in a weak-signal network.

Maybe people will think we've solved this switch problem, right? As more and more Wi-Fi networks come into our lives, switching problems are getting worse, and some researchers at MIT are beginning to tackle the problem.

The researchers, Lenin Ravindranath, Professor Hari Balakrishnan, an associate professor at the computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Madden and postdoctoral Calvin Newport, have developed a new communication protocol Make use of smartphone activity information to improve its switching function. In the experiment, the use of these protocols reduced the need for portable devices to switch networks by 40%, and the processing volume increased by 30%. In addition, these agreements have brought many other improvements, but I am not going to talk about them here.

Sensor overload

What I'm going to say is that MIT researchers are using data from various sensors on the phone, such as GPS, accelerometers and gyroscopes, to solve the problem.

Balakrishnan joked that the agreements were the result of their own internet problems, but he hoped they would be widely adopted by others.

In my opinion, using sensors like this to create an application to solve a common problem provides a futuristic landscape of what mobile apps can do. In this process, it can lead to a higher degree of participation. Of course there are applications (like some ipad game applications) that are already using sensors on devices, but most applications are still far from being able to take full advantage of the device's hardware capabilities.

So far, applications using a single sensor, such as a GPS, microphone, or webcam, have been inspiring. So imagine what the effect of these (and other) sensor "mashup" collaborations would be?

Balakrishnan was involved in the study of the Pottor Project (the Pothole Project), which basically uses data from sensors to calculate holes in all the roads in the Boston area and draw them on a map. It is an example of a smart use of mobile sensor data to build a web-based application. So what happens when you incorporate all the sensor data from your device into an application experience?

Philippe Karn Philippe Kahn, a veteran entrepreneur and co-founder of MotionX, said in describing the "rich sensor" environment, "the mobile platform that can perceive activity is the new media." The principles used by MotionX companies in their applications (such as motion X-gps and Motion X-gps Drive) are similar to those described in Balakrishnan.

The magic of the activity

Other applications can, of course, use data from a variety of sensors to "decrypt" our common activities, such as walking, resting, and riding. This is an activity layer on the sensor that provides the context that the application needs to understand, makes the application more appealing, and adds an "unexpected novelty" (serendipity) capability to the application.

Jeff Jonas (Jeff Jonas), a researcher at IBM, was one of the keynote speakers for the Big Data Conference (Businessesflat-out). Jonas often says that devices within an enterprise need to understand the "who, where, when, and why" issues in order to better understand and benefit from massive amounts of data. The same is true for the iphone and the ipad.

Mobile phones are not made for situational interaction, and instead, they have the same visual and situational capabilities as ours. To achieve this, application developers need to think differently, using sensor data as the core building blocks of the overall user experience, just as they do with the data they get from social maps.

When we think about mobile phones, we need to stop treating them as devices like computers, but as an extension of ourselves. The mobile devices in our hands need to understand what is happening in our lives and incorporate it into the experience based on these inputs. Last year I asked a question: Can mobile phones think?

If they can't think, they're going to get us in trouble soon, like the kind of trouble that motivates MIT researchers to solve the problem of network switching.