MOBILE COMPUTING APPLICATIONS: Personal Data Assistants

Personal Data Assistants (PDA) is fast becoming an emerging technology supporting mobile computing. Examples of PDA are the Newton, MagicCap, and OmniGo. These handheld portable devices are fully programmable to be configured as organizers or communicators.

Function

Prototype

PDAs serve as low-cost information collectors, providing a level of accuracy and feedback not available with paper-forms, and support the automatic transfer of data to workstations and central databases. PDAs can also be used as handheld manuals, showing diagrams, suggested scheduling and routing locations, and maintenance or diagnostic information to a user in environments where laptops may not be feasible, with remote access to reference materials, which may be hyperlinked.

Prototypes have been developed by Science Center include:

  1. demonstrations for emergency medical care, providing tutorials, checklist and accountability for field emergency trauma personnel
  2. machine setup in a manufacturing environment, provided hierarchically detailed solutions for setup of a machine for a specific part and operation
Examples of deployed prototype are "Truckin" and "EnvInv".

Truckin

For logging the trips and vehicle status of intra-Rocketdyne truckers, allows the truckers to more easily enter the required data, and makes it immediately available to the transportation department managers on their PCs.

EnvInv

Has been developed for the inventory of environmentally hazardous material; the user, per item in a location, chooses the manufacturer from an expanding popup list, and is then presented a constrained list of items provided by that manufacturer. This prototype may be aided by a bar-code scanner and transferred information to a central hazardous material database.

Has been developed for the inventory of environmentally hazardous material; the user, per item in a location, chooses the manufacturer from an expanding popup list, and is then presented a constrained list of items provided by that manufacturer. This prototype may be aided by a bar-code scanner and transferred information to a central hazardous material database.

Commercial Use

Commerial application for PDA such as business packages are readily available. These packages include providing general inventory control and tracking, interactions with central databases for material procurement, medical case management and billing, and general support. Other capabilities are:

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