Providing Enhanced Social Interaction Services for Industry Exhibitors at large Medical Conferences.

Martin Szomszor, Patty Kostkova, Ciro Cattuto, Wouter Van den Broeck, Alain Barrat, and Harith Alani. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Developments in eSystems Engineering (DeSE 2010), 6-8 September 2010, London.

Abstract

Large medical conferences offer opportunities for participants to find industry exhibitors that offer products and services relevant to their professional interests. Companies often invest significant effort in promotions that encourage participants to spend time at their stand (e.g. providing free gifts, leaflets, running competitions) and register some contact details. Attendees will use the conference to find others who also share similar professional interests, as well as keep up to date with developments on products such has pharmaceuticals and medical equipment. From both perspectives, a number of improvements can be made to enhance the overall experience by using existing active RFID technology: Vendors would be able to more closely monitor the success of their promotions with statistics on the stand’s visitors, as well as find more potential customers by using real-time visualizations; Participants would be able to log their social interactions, keeping an electronic history of the people they have met. The SocioPatterns project and Live Social Semantics experiments have recently demonstrated a scalable and robust infrastructure that would support these kinds of improvements. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure that provides enhanced social interaction services for vendors and participants by using small active RFID badges worn by attendees and attached to fixed locations.

URL: http://oro.open.ac.uk/22980/

PDF: http://oro.open.ac.uk/22980/1/DESE2010_szomszor_v4.pdf

BIBTEX:

@inproceedings{oro22980,
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Developments in eSystems
 Engineering (DeSE 2010)},
  title = {Providing Enhanced Social Interaction Services for Industry Exhibitors
    at large Medical Conferences},
  author = {Szomszor, Martin and Kostkova, Patty and Cattuto, Ciro and {Van den Broeck}, Wouter
    and Barrat, Alain and Alani, Harith},
  year = {2010},
  url = {http://oro.open.ac.uk/22980/},
  keywords = {SocioPatterns}
}