Using Bluetooth Device Names to Support Interaction in Smart Environments

An increasing trend in mobile and pervasive computing is the augmentation of everyday public spaces with local computation - leading to so-called smart environments. However, there are no well accepted techniques for supporting spontaneous interaction between mobile users and these smart environments, though a wide range of techniques have been explored ranging from gesture recognition to downloading applications to a user's phone. In this paper, the authors explore an approach to supporting such interaction based on the use of Bluetooth device (user-friendly) names as a control channel between users' mobile phones and computational resources in their local environment. Such an approach has many advantages over existing techniques though it is not without limitations.