People increasingly communicate via services such as email, fax, and telephony. A partial solution to information overload is to give people timely and filtered information, most relevant to the context of their current tasks. Seamless access to personal information and communication services should be made available to users in a passive and unobtrusive manner, based on their level of attention and interruptability. Simple devices such as pagers provide a convenient form of alerting users to remote information. Such devices offer an extremely low-bandwidth for communication and the interface does not afford rich delivery of information content.
Telephones are ubiquitous and cellular services offer mobility.
However telephones primarily operate on a synchronous model of communication, requiring availability of both parties, and high tolls for accessing services since a connection must be maintained while listening to the news or stock report. All processing must be done on the telephony servers, rather than the phone itself. The requirement of synchronous connection prevents the device from continuously sensing its user and environment. The goal of Nomadic Radio is to develop an infrastructure and interface techniques for adaptive notification, messaging and communication services on a wearable device, with audio as the primary interaction modality. The contextual state of the user and the environment will be utilized to present relevant information in the user's listening space.