Smart devices

A smart device is an electronic device, generally connected to other devices or networks via different wireless protocols such as Bluetooth, NFC, Wi-Fi, 3G, etc., that can operate to some extent interactively and autonomously. Several notable types of smart devices are smartphones, phablets and tablets, smartwatches, smart bands and smart key chains. The term can also refer to a device that exhibits some properties of ubiquitous computing, including—although not necessarily—artificial intelligence.

Smart devices can be designed to support a variety of form factors, a range of properties pertaining to ubiquitous computing and to be used in three main system environments: physical world, human-centered environments and distributed computing environments.

In 1991 Mark Weiser proposed three basic forms for ubiquitous system devices: tabs, pads and boards.

These three forms proposed by Weiser are characterised by being macro-sized, having a planar form and by incorporating visual output displays. These were also envisioned more as information appliances. If we relax each of these three characteristics we can expand this range into a much more diverse and potentially more useful range of ubiquitous computing devices. Hence, three additional forms for ubiquitous systems have been proposed:

Smart devices can be characterised as follows:

Common types of smart devices include:

Weiser's vision for ubiquitous computing can be summarized in terms of three core properties:

It is proposed that there are two additional core types of properties for UbiCom systems:

However, it is hard to fix a closed set of properties that define all ubiquitous computing devices because of the sheer range and variety of ubiquitous computing research and applications. Rather than to propose a single definition for ubiquitous computing, a taxonomy of properties for ubiquitous computing has been proposed, from which different kinds or flavours of ubiquitous systems and applications can be composed and described.

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