CSR: Medium: Extensible Distributed Systems Solutions for Community Supported Child-Independent Mobility

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Child independent mobility (CIM) refers to the freedom of children to move about their neighborhoods without direct adult supervision. It is widely accepted that CIM is essential to emotional, social, and physical well-being, yet CIM has dramatically declined. This project uses the Internet of Things (IoT) to foster community supported CIM. In the IoT, every "thing" can sense its surroundings and communicate wirelessly with other nearby things. When all children have a small digital beacon, adult community members carry mobile devices, and the neighborhood itself has embedded devices, the community can support safe CIM in a local and self-organizing way. The project will support CIM using local community resources, made available using increasingly common device-to-device wireless links. The project is organized along two primary research thrusts. First, the project designs novel protocols for continuous neighbor discovery that enable IoT devices to discover other nearby devices with minimal energy costs. Second, given the ability to efficiently discover other nearby devices, the project explores the ability for parents and other caregivers to define declarative policies for community data. These policies allow the creation of rules for assessing the state of a child's IoT device to ensure that desired safety conditions are satisfied. The project focuses on the application domain of child independent mobility, whose decline is negatively impacting children's health and well-being. In this respect, the project has significant and broad impact. The project explores several novel aspects of privacy and security in infrastructure-less IoT applications. Finally, the project's contributions are also widely applicable to many IoT application domains, and the project will additionally explore, for instance, smart tourism, where keeping track of a cohesive tour group while ensuring the participants' enjoyment can be economically important. All data and code artifacts that result from this project will be made available in the public domain on a publicly accessible repository available at http://github.com/UT-MPC. The code will be available and maintained for at least five years after the end of the project. All results will also be documented extensively online at http://mpc.ece.utexas.edu/.