Over the last few years an INCITS working committee called V2 has been working with the novel idea of a Universal Remote Console (URC) that could work with many devices. The basic idea of URC is to have a small instrument like a PDA work as a remote control for any remotely controllable device in its vicinity. Two different requirements exist:
Once programmed, devices such as PDA's act as a univeral remote control for products such as a TV, DVD, microwave, or medical device.
To achieve this, the ANSI standards committee working with expert at University of Wisconsin, Madison, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD and few other organizations came with the idea of URC by designing a set of Extensible Markup Language (XML) files for each of the devices. In this situation, a controllable device is called a ‘target’ and the controlling device (or the PDA) is called the URC. The important thing to remember in this design is that, the target provides a set of XML files to the URC and URC does not have to know beforehand, what target files contain. Two steps are involved in this process. First, when the URC is powered on, it dynamically detects all the devices in its vicinity by finding the set of files offered by all the targets nearby. In the second step, once a target is detected from the same set of XML files, URC will be able to dynamically construct a user interface for the target. In other words, URC does not have to know what buttons, controls, or displays it needs to control the target. What the controls the URC needs to control the target and the other data are mentioned in one of the XML files the target is equipped with. Without the set of XML files, a URC cannot ‘detect’ a target in the first case.
This project falls under the RERC-AMI's Development Program 3 - Emerging and Accessible Healthcare Technologies, and is the RERC’s primary activity related to Project D3.2 (Modality Translation & Cross-Disability Interfaces for Communication), which aims to demonstrate strategic alternatives for user-centered medical monitoring interfaces that enhance accessibility. Specifically, the RERC-AMI proposed to collaborate with other third parties (e.g., other RERCs) to develop approaches for modality translation, and to participate in the technical development process for standards and guidelines that help ensure that people with disabilities have access to medical technologies and services.
This project is coordinated by Dr. Jack Winters, with the target files and the simulation environment the work primarily of Dr. Sarma Danturthi, the PDA-based prototype Accessibility Survey and the MedURC interface generator primarily by Pawan Shroff as part of a Master's Thesis expected to be completed during the Fall 2005 semester. Also part of the URC team, especially as related to the development of UniTherapy that includes UPnP support, and the development of an interface for automatically creating socket and presentation template files, is doctoral student Xin "Tyre" Feng.