Mobile Context Awareness

1. Introduction

As human beings we have a plethora of senses that provide us with information about our proximate surroundings. Our sight, hearing and touch predominantly define how we perceive our environment and fathom the world [1]. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution taught us to use the information gathered from our senses to efficiently communicate ideas among us and to respond fittingly. Therefore, when people interact, they can use inherent situational information to increase the conversation flow. This information is often referred to as context [2].

On the contrary, human-computer communication lacks this transmission of ideas since the computer does not have the same perception as a human being. The infusion of implicit data in the human-computer interaction is therefore essential for the implementation of more useful computational services [2, 3]. In the early 90s the researchers of ubiquitous computing at Xerox PARC caused a change in thinking. They suggested that context could act as a means for system adaptation [4]. In 1994, Bill Schilit coined the term “context-aware” computing [5] to characterize systems that could sense and react to a variety of situational stimuli. Context was mainly limited to location at the time but over the years many authors debate that “there is more to context than location” [6, p.893].

The significance of context has gradually increased these past two decades because of the progressive permeation of computers in our lives. Consequently, context-awareness has been a prominent theme for mobile and pervasive systems research for many years [7]. A determinant factor in the advance of mobile context-awareness is arguably the mobile device. Its universality paired with the increa...

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