Context awareness

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

Adding some smartness to devices and everyday things

Abstract: In mobile computing, context-awareness indicates the ability of a system to obtain and use information on aspects of the system environment. To implement context-awareness, mobile system components have to be augmented with the ability to capture aspects of their environment. Recent work has mostly considered location-awareness, and hence augmentation of mobile artifacts with locality. We discuss augmentation of mobile artifacts with diverse sets of sensors and perception techniques for awareness of context beyond location. We report experience from two projects, one on augmentation of mobile phones with awareness technologies, and the other on embedding of awareness technology in everyday non-digital artifacts.

Context-aware resource management in multi-inhabitant smart homes a Nash H-learning based approach

Abstract: A smart home aims at building intelligence automation with a goal to provide its inhabitants with maximum possible comfort, minimize the resource consumption and thus overall cost of maintaining the home. 'Context awareness' is perhaps the most salient feature of such an intelligent environment. Clearly, an inhabitant's mobility and activities play a significant role in defining his contexts in and around the home. Although there exists an optimal algorithm for location and activity tracking of a single inhabitant, the correlation and dependence between multiple inhabitants' contexts within the same environment make the location and activity tracking more challenging. In this paper, we first prove that the optimal location prediction across multiple inhabitants in smart homes is an NP-hard problem. Next, to capture the correlation and interactions of different inhabitants' movements (and hence activities), we develop a novel framework based on a game theoretic, Nash H-learning approach that attempts to minimize the joint location uncertainty. The framework achieves a Nash equilibrium such that no inhabitant is given preference over others. This results in more accurate prediction of contexts and better adaptive control of automated devices, leading to a mobility-aware resource (say, energy) management scheme in multi-inhabitant smart homes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of adaptively controlling a smart environment, thus reducing energy consumption and enhancing the comfort of the inhabitants.

Exploiting context to support social awareness and social navigation

Abstract: The utilization of context (such as user location and user profile) opens up many new avenues for encouraging social interaction. The web-based GUIDE system enables visitors to the city of Lancaster to interact with an information model that represents the city via a hand-held and context-aware tourist guide. Our current work is focusing on extending the functionality of the (previously single user) GUIDE system by making parts of the information model public. In particular, the physical location of visitors can now be represented in the information space in order to enable a form of social awareness among city visitors. In addition, visitors can also change the information space by, for example, augmenting existing descriptions of the city's attractions with their own ratings. We believe that explicitly capturing and tagging the context associated with ratings provides a powerful mechanism for automatically tailoring information presented to the user.

Supporting information access in a hospital ward by a context-aware mobile electronic patient record

Abstract: Context-awareness holds promise for improving the utility of software products. Context-aware mobile systems encompass the ability to automatically discover and react to changes in an environment. Most contemporary context-aware mobile systems aim to support users in private situations, for example, as tourist guides. Thus, we still lack an understanding of the impact of context-awareness in professional work situations. In this paper, we explore context-awareness for mobile electronic patient records through the design of a context-aware mobile prototype called MobileWard. The aim of MobileWard is to support nurses in conducting morning procedures in a hospital ward. MobileWard is context-aware as it is able to discover and react autonomously according to changes in the environment and since it integrates the ability to provide information and services to the user where the relevancy depends on the user’s task. We evaluate MobileWard in two usability evaluations to assess the usefulness of the system and we find that context-awareness holds some promising opportunities, but that it also introduces some potential interaction problems when users are mobile and working in a professional environment. Implications and limitations of the proposed solution are further discussed.