Context awareness

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

An Assistive Navigation System Based on Augmented Reality and Context Awareness for People With Mild Cognitive Impairments

Abstract: This paper presents a system for supplying spatial orientation and support to cognitively impaired people in their daily activities. The system is a technological solution based on external aid at a practical level (substitution-based rehabilitation). In particular, we propose a model focused on points of interest or well-known places, in which user-friendly routes to a destination are generated based on the user context rather than the conventional street names and quantitative distances. Moreover, the system offers augmented reality views that include contextual information. This philosophy of navigation more closely matches the needs of the user than do conventional navigation systems; the proposal is especially useful for users who are not accustomed to using new technologies (e.g., elderly people), people experiencing disorientation and, more generally, individuals with a slight cognitive deficit. The system also includes an application that allows the relatives of the user to establish tasks that must be performed at a specific location and to monitor the activities of the user to detect potentially risky situations.

The Design and Use of a Generic Context Server

Abstract: Although context awareness is a key component for perceptual user interfaces, we lack generic infrastructure for developing context aware applications. We propose a generic infrastructure based on context servers that store, share and archive contextual data. We describe a few applications we have built that take advantage of context sharing and context history. We then turn to the overall design of our context server and analyze in detail its services with a worked example.

Experiments with multi-modal interfaces in a context-aware city guide

Abstract: In recent years there has been considerable research into the development of mobile context-aware applications. The canonical example of such an application is the context-aware tour-guide that offers city visitors information tailored to their preferences and environment. The nature of the user interface for these applications is critical to their success. Moreover, the user interface and the nature and modality of information presented to the user impacts on many aspects of the system’s overall requirements, such as screen size and network provision. Current prototypes have used a range of different interfaces developed in a largely ad-hoc fashion and there has been no systematic exploration of user preferences for information modality in mobile context-aware applications. In this paper we describe a series of experiments with multi-modal interfaces for context-aware city guides. The experiments build on our earlier research into the GUIDE system and include a series of field trials involving members of the general public. We report on the results of these experiments and extract design guidelines for the developers of future mobile context-aware applications.

Mobile agents: can they assist with context awareness?

Abstract: This position paper argues that the mobile agents paradigm is a useful and important technology enabling pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Context awareness drives adaptability of pervasive computing systems. It is asserted that mobile agents capable of discovering, extracting, interpreting and validating context will make significant contribution to increasing efficiency, flexibility and feasibility of pervasive computing systems.

Context-awareness and mobile devices

Abstract: Context-awareness is a maturing area within the field of ubiquitous computing. It is particularly relevant to the growing sub-field of mobile computing as a user’s context changes more rapidly when a user is mobile, and interacts with more devices and people in a greater number of locations. In this chapter, we present a definition of context and context-awareness and describe its importance to human-computer interaction and mobile computing. We describe some of the difficulties in building context-aware applications and the solutions that have arisen to address these. Despite these solutions, users have difficulties in using and adopting mobile context-aware applications. We discuss these difficulties and present a set of eight design guidelines that can aid application designers in producing more usable and useful mobile context-aware applications.