MobiLife: Overview and vision

People are used to being able to contact anyone, anywhere, at anytime. However, the challenge of enabling mass-market-scale ubiquitous services and applications remains. MobiLife Integrated Project in IST-FP6 was to bring advances in mobile applications and services within the reach of users in their everyday life by innovating and deploying new applications and services based on the evolving capabilities of the 3G systems and beyond. The project addressed with a strong user-centric view problematics related to different end-user devices, available communication networks, interaction modes, applications and services.

Goals and objectives

Figure 1: MobiLife goals and objectives

MobiLife Consortium

The MobiLife consortium consisted of 22 partners in 9 countries, 5 application owners and SMEs, 3 operators, 8 manufacturers and 6 academic partners. MobiLife was part of the Wireless World Initiative (WWI), which comprised several projects for IST.

MobiLife four main work areas

• User centricity
• Practical applications and services
• Architectures and technologies
• Evaluation

Focus areas

Three communication spheres: self-awareness, group-awareness and world-awareness.

Figure 2: MobiLife communication spheres

Look at the world from the user perspective

• Try to understand the user needs.
• How these needs can be transferred to technological and non-technological requirements.
• How the product development process can be elaborated to iteratively and interactively take those needs and requirements into account.

Figure 3: MobiLife methodology

MobiLife approach

As users are participating in varying social contexts in everyday life, we need a facility to maintain such relations: To communicate. To share items and time. To manage today's complex lifestyles.

Figure 4: Future communication systems

Figure 5: Interaction between focus areas

This mandated the development of group awareness support enabling the automatic and meaningful (self) organisation of communication means, view and use of shared items, adapted to the relevant context. Equally important, this required new privacy and trust models, so that such solutions could gain user acceptance. These models must also be understandable to the users. To make these services and applications real, the project investigated key application enablers and technologies deemed crucial for their implementation, keeping in mind the qualitative constraints such as the very large number of end-users and their diversity.

Technologies for maintaining a “shared cognition” amongst groups of users, such as modelling and reasoning for contextual awareness, technologies for facilitating and maintaining privacy and trust, and technologies for creating and sharing various kinds of content and media related to everyday life belonged to key areas covered in the project. The enablers and technologies were embodied in application experience prototypes, thus providing the project further opportunities to learn interactively how they could facilitate providing sustained added value to the end-users. None of the services and applications developed in the project would ever reach the end-users, if they could not in practice be created and provided by some value network consisting of network operators, service operators, content providers, integrators, and others as may be needed. Therefore, the full service lifecycle covering service creation, packaging, configuration, provision, and support was addressed by the project, thus complementing the user-centric view with the equally decisive value network view.

In the context of the marketplace dynamics, the project also studied the relevant business models and societal issues, in particular potential legal problems and their solutions.

MobiLife Work Packages

Table 1: Work package names and partner leaders

Figure 6: Interaction between Work Packages

Project's Stages

Figure 7: Project stages

MobiLife and WWI

In the larger context of the WWI, MobiLife cooperated with the majority of world-leading operators, suppliers, research organisations, and other industries with the aim to develop an integrated approach and to reach global consensus on a new, robust, and technology independent future communications systems environment.

MobiLife Partners

Link: MobiLife partners