Context awareness

About: Context awareness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5790 publications have been published within this topic receiving 119944 citations.

Visualization and interaction of pervasive services using context-aware augmented reality

Abstract: Pervasive, context-aware computing is a vision of our future computing lifestyle in which computer systems seamlessly integrate into our everyday lives, providing services and information in anywhere and anytime fashion. Augmented reality (AR) can naturally complement pervasive computing by providing an intuitive and interactive interface to a three-dimensional information space embedded within physical reality. This paper presents a new approach to supporting context-aware and adaptable visualization and interaction of pervasive services by combining context awareness with augmented reality. The framework utilizes AR for providing immersive and interactive visualization and interaction by embedding virtual models onto physical environments, which realizes bi-augmentation between physical and virtual spaces. It also offers a context-aware and adaptable service module to acquire, interpret and reason context information for context adaptable visualization. In particular, the module considers user preferences, device profiles, and security for providing users with higher levels of personalization that capture different elements of user contexts. The proposed approach has been successfully applied to various pervasive applications such as ubiquitous home, ubiquitous car, and ubiquitous engineering collaboration, which shows the effectiveness and novelty of the proposed approach.

3-D indoor positioning method using a single compact base station

Abstract: Context awareness will become increasingly important in future domestic consumer electronics. In many domestic context aware applications, there is a need for location and orientation information about persons, devices or objects in the home. This information can be provided by a dedicated indoor location system. A consumer location system should be robust, safe, easy to set up, low cost, and should have a minimal infrastructure. In this paper, a step towards consumer location systems is taken by proposing an ultrasonic positioning method that needs just a single compact base station to measure 3D positions of mobile devices in a room. The method employs ultrasound time-of-flight tri-lateration to estimate device positions, using a base station containing an array of three ultrasound transducers. Five potential problems of the proposed method are identified; the main problem being line-of-sight path occlusion. The method has been prototyped, and initial results show an accuracy of 1.41 m or better for 95% of the position estimates, in case of a good line-of-sight path. It is concluded that the method is promising for providing 3D position information at around 1 m accuracy for context aware applications, but that the problem of line-of-sight occlusion requires further investigation.

Model-driven Engineering of Active Context-awareness

Abstract: More and more Web users ask for contents and services highly tailored to their particular contexts of use. Especially due to the increasing affordability of new and powerful mobile communication devices, they also appreciate the availability of ubiquitous access, independent from the device actually in use. Due to such premises, traditional software design methods need to be extended, and new issues and requirements need to be addressed for supporting context-aware access to services and applications. In this paper we propose a model-driven approach towards adaptive, context-aware Web applications, accompanied by a general-purpose execution framework enabling active context-awareness. Whereas conventional adaptive hypermedia systems address the problem of adapting HTML pages in response to user-generated requests, in this work we especially stress the importance of user-independent, context-triggered adaptivity actions. This finally leads us to interpret the context as an active actor, operating independently from users during their navigations.

A semantic end-to-end QoS model for dynamic service oriented environments

Abstract: In Service Oriented Computing (SOC), modeling the Quality of Service (QoS) is a cornerstone for providing services with quality guarantees. As the technological advances and wide adoption of handheld devices (e.g., PDA and smartphones) and wireless networks (e.g., UMTS, WiFi and Bluetooth) have made service environments more dynamic, QoS models must change accordingly. In this paper, we present a QoS model that provides the approporiate ground for QoS engineering in SOC. Our model focuses on emerging QoS features related to the dynamics of service environments such as user mobility and context awareness of application services. It also considers QoS on an end-to-end basis by covering QoS features of all the resources and actors involved in service provisioning (e.g., network, device, service, end-user). Our model represents QoS with rich semantic information and makes use of the Web Service Quality Model (WSQM) proposed by OASIS.

Social Access vs. Privacy in Wearable Computing: A Case Study of Autism

Abstract: People with high-functioning autism face challenges in communication and social interaction. This article considers the possibility, and perhaps inevitability, of wearable devices such as Google Glass being used as real-time assistive technologies for this group, with the intent of enabling them to better access our complex social world. Social impairments, by their very nature, highlight issues of communication, personal information, and social judgment. In considering such assistive technology in this context, the authors explore new tensions between privacy issues and assistive technologies, especially those of a do-it-yourself nature, which are not immediately solvable within our current privacy frameworks. This article is part of a special issue on privacy and security.