An advanced concept of assistance for mobile customers of POS

This paper deals with the topic of advanced concepts of assistance for the mobile user. Especially users of e-business terminals in public places such as banking machines (ATM), ticket selling machines and alike were in the focus of the work presented here. Our technical approach is based on a remote access platform for POS, POI allowing users to interact with terminal systems over wireless connections through a personal digital assistant (PDA). Dynamic discovery of services allows the user to select services when entering the transmission range of a terminal. In offline-state the mobile device provides a standard interface to commercial services allowing the user to compose a shopping list in advance, supported by an assistant generating propositions from the knowledge of former purchases and general product classifications. The interface to commercial services is designed on a rather generic level in order to allow transactions in almost any domain, ranging from banking to grocery. Our work is currently supported by the project EMBASSI, which is co-funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).