STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF NFC TECHNOLOGY ON THE UNIVERSITY SOCIETY

EHEA guidelines are promoting the modernization of the European universities, focusing on the implementation of new technologies to get services offered by universities closer to society. With this idea in mind, the Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena (UPCT) is involved in the development and implementation of the so-called Smart University model: an ubiquitous computing platform based on NFC, where NFC devices and applications interact with each other to provide an ubiquitous computing system where relationships between people, practice and technology happen as a part of a natural “touching” interaction paradigm; and the interaction in the environment is realized by bringing the mobile device into contact or very close to smart objects. But, the project of the Smart University cannot be addressed if the acceptance of university society is not sufficient. Hence, the first step is to know the impact of the use of NFC technology in a university environment. Under this idea, a deep study has been carried out, finding out the expected impact of the NFC technology use by the university society (teachers, students and personal staff); the degree of penetration; the hardware and software requirements; the concerns about security and privacy; and the technological impact. The study was also focused on extracting the acceptance of some NFC applications projected to be implemented in the UPCT.