Ubiquitous laboratory: A research support environment for ubiquitous learning based on sensor networks

With the great progress of technologies, computers are embedded into everywhere to make our daily life convenient, efficient and comfortable. In the learning field, ubiquitous technologies make it possible to provide services to learners anytime and anywhere in the real world. In this paper, we present an ubiquitous environment to support college students, professors, and visitors in a laboratory to encourage positive research activities. Actions of people in the Ubiquitous Laboratory (U-Lab) are individually detected by sensor networks and analyzed to provide supports. Based on these collected information, U-Lab provides services such as to grasp a precise research progress and share research information among students and professors. We also propose a method to advise students to improve their research activities. As a case study, we implemented a Ubiquitous Corner (U-Corner) to prove our proposal is useful and practical.