Context awareness

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

Sensor data fusion for activity monitoring in the PERSONA ambient assisted living project

Abstract: User activity monitoring is a major problem in ambient assisted living, since it requires to infer new knowledge from collected and fused sensor data while dealing with highly dynamic environments, where devices continuously change their availability and (or) physical location. In the context of the European project PERSONA, we have developed an activity monitoring sub-system characterized by high modularity, little invasiveness of the environment and good responsiveness. In this paper we first illustrate the functional architecture of the proposed solution from a general point of view, discussing the motivations of the design. Then we describe in details the software components—sensor abstraction and integration layer, human posture classification, activity monitor—and the resulting activity monitoring application, presenting also a performance evaluation.

Short-range communication-enabled mobile device, method and related server arrangement

Abstract: A mobile device (102, 202, 302) for enhancing context awareness in social networking comprises a processor (220) for processing data, a memory (222) for storing data, a wireless transceiver (224, 224B) for wirelessly transmitting and receiving data relative to remote devices, a short-range wireless transceiver (224, 224A), e.g. an NFC transceiver, for wirelessly transmitting and receiving data relative to remote devices equipped with a compatible short-range interface, a social contact registration logic (206, 604) configured to obtain information from a mobile communications device of a social contact via the short-range wireless transceiver, the information identifying the social contact and/or the mobile communications device of the social contact, a context detection logic (206, 608) configured to obtain, via the short-range wireless transceiver, data distinctive to and provided by a tag disposed in a location accessible via the short-range data transfer, said distinctive data being thus indicative of the current location-based context of the mobile communications device and the user thereof, and a context notification logic (206, 606) configured to transmit an indication of the detected location-based context to a remote entity, such as a server, via the wireless transceiver in order to enable providing at least one social contact of the user of the mobile communications device with knowledge of the current context.

VOLARE: context-aware adaptive cloud service discovery for mobile systems

Abstract: With the recent widespread use of smart mobile devices, as well as the increasing availability of fast and reliable wireless Internet connections for mobile devices, there is increased interest in mobile applications where the majority of the processing occurs on the server side. The flexibility, stability and scalability offered by cloud services make them an ideal architecture to use in client applications in a resource limited mobile environment. This is because mobile application usage patterns tend to be uneven, with various usage spikes according to time and location. However, the mobile setting presents a set of new challenges that cloud service discovery methods developed for non-mobile environments cannot address. The requirements a mobile client device will have from a cloud service may change due to changes in the context of the device, which may include hardware resources, environmental variables or user preferences. Binding to a service offering different quality of service levels from the ones required may lead to excess consumption of mobile resources such as battery life, as well as unnecessarily high provision costs. This paper introduces VOLARE, a middleware-based solution that monitors the resources and context of the device, and dynamically adapts cloud service requests accordingly, at discovery time or at runtime. This approach will allow for more resource-efficient and reliable cloud service discovery, as well as significant cost savings at runtime.

A context-aware augmented reality system to assist the maintenance operators

Abstract: The increasing complexity and the technology advancement of equipment pose challenges to the maintenance operators nowadays. In this paper, a context-aware augmented reality (AR) system is proposed to assist the operators in routine and ad hoc maintenance tasks by providing them with context relevant information. This system integrates AR technology and context-awareness. It is able to analyze the contexts of the maintenance tasks and provide relevant and useful information to the operators through rendering the information on the real equipment and environment. In addition, the authoring of context-aware AR contents, which is essential for developing such applications, is explored. The properties of AR contents and their context-adaptation schemes are discussed, and a low-level authoring approach is proposed for constructing context-aware AR information. Finally, a case study is conducted to evaluate the system performance, and the results demonstrated that the system can adapt to dynamic maintenance situations to provide context relevant information to assist the maintenance operators.

What's in the Eyes for Context-Awareness?

Abstract: Eye movements are a rich source of information about a person's context. Analyzing the link between eye movements and cognition might even allow us to develop cognition-aware pervasive computing systems that assess a person's cognitive context.