UbiqBIOPARC: A Wireless and Sensor Based Context-Aware System for an Enhanced Guide Experience

This work discusses and evaluates the use of wireless and multi-sensor based technologies to develop UbiqBIOPARC, a new generation zoological park that has been created based on the zoo-immersion concept. It offers appropriate contextual information to zoo visitors, depending on their preferences and the environment in which they are positioned. It combines the flexibility of the iPhone SDK, the connectivity provided by 3G technologies, the location capabilities of GPS, and the orientation offered by a digital compass integrated in the device. In this document the overall architecture and the implementation steps followed to create this context-aware application are presented. We compare our system with respect to previous ones and demonstrate that UbiqBIOPARC is an example of how innovative context-aware applications can be built with the aid of GPS and compass features. Several real experiments have been carried out in order to evaluate performance and system behavior, and numerical results demonstrate the practicality offered by our application, while providing a quite reasonable performance in terms of delay, usability, and energy efficiency.