Communications: electrical – Condition responsive indicating system – With particular system function
Reexamination Certificate
2001-06-11
2003-12-16
Pope, Daryl (Department: 2632)
Communications: electrical
Condition responsive indicating system
With particular system function
C340S010100, C340S539230, C455S412100
Reexamination Certificate
active
06664891
ABSTRACT:
The present invention relates to services offered to users of electronic equipment, especially but not exclusively to users of mobile communications devices such as portable telephones and suitably equipped PDA's (personal digital assistants). The invention further relates to means for use in the delivery of such services, and to devices for receiving them.
Recent years have seen a great increase in subscribers world-wide to mobile telephone networks and, through advances in technology and the addition of functionalities, cellular telephones have become personal, trusted devices. A result of this is that a mobile information society is developing, with personalised and localised services becoming increasingly more important. Such “Context-Aware” (CA) mobile telephones are used with low power, short range base stations in places like shopping malls to provide location-specific information. This information might include local maps, information on nearby shops and restaurants and so on. The user's CA terminal may be equipped to filter the information received according to pre-stored user preferences and the user is only alerted if an item of data of particular interest has been received.
An example of a CA terminal is given in U.S. Pat. No. 5,835,861 which discloses the use of wireless telephones within the context of advertisement billboards. The user of a wireless telephone obtains the telephone number of a vendor by activating his/her wireless telephone to transmit a prompt signal to an active advertisement source and to receive from the advertisement source a response signal containing the telephone number of the advertising vendor. The telephone number can then be used to automatically place a call to that vendor via the public switched telephone network. Alternatively, the telephone number can be stored for use later on. This arrangement can be used to place a call to a vendor without having to either memorise the telephone number or to write it down. The signals between the billboard and the caller can be transmitted as modulated infrared (IR) signals.
Many services and applications proposed for CA systems benefit from a genuine broadcast mode that does not require the mobile terminal to join a wireless network. The Media Lab of MIT have devised ‘meme badges’ or ‘Thinking Tags’ which allow wearers to exchange simple text messages or quotations when they are within i.r. range and in line-of-sight. Other similar concepts such as ‘hot badges’ have been published, for example by Philips Design in their 1996 ‘Vision of the Future’ (http://www.design.philips.com/vof/), where personal devices broadcast profile information about their users to the local area, to be picked up by other nearby participants for correlating personal matches. In addition, a short-range r.f. device (“the Lovegety”) became a craze for ‘blind date’ facilitation between teenagers in Japan in 1998. Users of the Lovegety could set one of three pre-assigned signals and be audibly and visually alerted when another Lovegety owner was in range, the alert being different when the encountering users have both selected the same settings (which might correspond for instance to looking for a date).
The authors of these devices and concepts have articulated a range of personal and social applications that can be facilitated by such electronic augmentations of users' projections of personalities, interests, moods, skills or resources. The Lovegety craze indicates the potential mass popularity of such a short-range r.f. device for teenagers. In a professional setting, such as a large commercial show, such ‘ice-breaker’ devices can bring together people with complementary business interests or be used as a form of electronic business card exchange.
Custom devices such as those above are limited in their market penetration, while mobile telephones are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. With Bluetooth communications protocols predicted to become a common technology in mobile communications devices, one possible solution to the problems of establishing a broadcast mode for CA applications might be via the full current Bluetooth handshaking process to set up a two-way Bluetooth connection for data exchange between mobiles carried by consenting users selecting such a service. As explained in our co-pending United Kingdom patent application no. 0015454.2 (from which the present application claims priority, and the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference), in the context of mobile user encounters with fixed beacons, the current Bluetooth connection protocol carries the disadvantages of:
Time to establish the connection before any data can be exchanged (10-30 seconds, by which time the encountering parties may be out of r.f. range);
Power consumption for hand shaking transmissions on behalf of the listening device to establish network connection;
Limits of number of active listening devices that can be addressed by the broadcasting device (7 active in a piconet);
Loss of privacy by the listening device as its device id. becomes known by the broadcasting device in the process of establishing the connection. In many opportunistic situations, the listener to a broadcast wishes their identity and location to remain anonymous and private. This is a major drawback.
Another possible solution for these CA applications might be via a central service that registers those mobile users in proximity to a fixed infrastructure and for example compares web-stored user profiles, alerting users via Bluetooth or the cellular network of matches. However this again suffers from some of the disadvantages above (especially privacy) and, in addition, restricts the encounters to pre-determined places where a user-locating r.f. beacon is installed, rather than ad-hoc encounters.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a means whereby users of portable communications devices can broadcast information to one another without requiring dedicated hardware or a fixed infrastructure.
In accordance with a first aspect of the present invention there is provided a communications system comprising at least one first portable device capable of wireless message transmission and at least one second portable device capable of receiving such a message transmission, wherein the at least one first portable device is arranged to broadcast a series of inquiry messages each in the form of a plurality of predetermined data fields arranged according to a first communications protocol, wherein the at least one first portable device is further arranged to add to each inquiry message prior to transmission an additional data field, and wherein the at least one second portable device is arranged to receive the transmitted inquiry messages and read data from said additional data field. By the addition of a broadcast messaging scheme to the inquiry phase, messages may be transmitted from one user to another (or to many) without requiring either the sending or receiving user device to join a piconet.
In such a system, the at least one first portable device may be arranged to add said additional data field at the end of a respective inquiry message and/or the at least one first portable device may be arranged to include an indication in one of said predetermined data fields, said indication denoting the presence of said additional data field.
Suitably, although not essentially, the above-referenced first communications protocol comprises Bluetooth messaging, with the at least one first portable device optionally being configured to broadcast a series of inquiry messages on a predetermined clocked succession of frequencies, with clock information for said first portable device being included in data carried by said additional data field. As will be described hereinafter, the said additional data field may be of any given size, from a few bits to at least 64 bits of data and optionally more.
To enable a portable device to filter out unwanted messages in a system as above, the at least one first portable device may be arranged to include in a messag
Davies Robert J.
Rankin Paul J.
Koninklijke Philips Electronics , N.V.
Pope Daryl
Slobod Jack D.
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