Instant Personalization and Temporary Ownership of Handheld Devices 

Juergen Bohn Institute for Pervasive Computing, ETH Zurich bohn@inf.ethz.ch 


Abstract 

As we increasingly depend on inexpensive handheld devices at work and in 
daily living, ensuring the accessibility of those devices and the availability 
of the personalized services they provide becomes a major challenge. In this 
paper, we present a system for instant personalization and temporary ownership 
of mobile devices that addresses these issues. The system enables the user to 
make the transition from requiring a specific individual device to utilizing 
any device at hand. This significantly raises the degree of redundancy of 
devices accessible to the user from one to a potentially unlimited number of 
devices of a certain type. The system that we have prototypically implemented 
further provides support for periodic data backup, data recovery, and data 
confidentiality when devices are lost or stolen.