The Smart Box Concept for Ubiquitous Computing Environments 

Christian Floerkemeier, Matthias Lampe, Thomas Schoch 

Institute for Pervasive Computing Department of Computer Science ETH Zurich, 
Switzerland 

In everyday life we are often faced with the need to monitor the contents of 
some kind of container e.g. the contents of a medicine cabinet or a tool box. 
In this paper we show that this entire class of scenarios has similar features 
and properties. To remove the annoyance associated by the user with this 
monitoring task we propose a smart box concept. In this concept the monitoring 
is facilitated by any automatic identification technology. RFID technology 
proved to be a suitable means to invisibly monitor the contents of the box 
without requiring the user to adapt the way he interacts with the smart 
objects. We describe the characteristics of the smart box concept and then 
demonstrate the usability of the smart box concept with three applications: 
the smart toolbox, the smart medicine cabinet and the smart surgical kit.