Pervasive Mobile Applications

Technological achievements in user context monitoring techniques enable automating certain computational tasks which are executed by anticipating the user’s intention. These kind of techniques are based on the processing of sensor information that is collected from multiple sources such as smartphones, environment, etc.

In the case of smartphones, sensor information is gathered by embedded micromechanical artifacts (e.g. accelerometer, gyroscope, etc) and processed locally in real-time (in the phone) for changing some usability aspects in the mobile applications. For instance, the accelerometer sensor can be used for rotating the screen of the device depending on how the user is holding the handset. Another example is the light sensor which enables augmenting and decreasing the brightness of the mobile screen according to the situation of the environment (e.g. indoor, outdoor, etc).

Similarly, environmental sensor information is provisioned as a service (raw data) to mobile users by locating multiple microelectromechanical appliances within the environment. For instance, a thermistor sensor can be located for perceiving the temperature in the context of the user so that a mobile application can use that information for a proactive reaction (e.g. displaying different background screens or triggering a vibration event in the case of mobile pervasive games).

Research staff

Projects

  • Tanel Tähepõld – Context-aware Mobile Games using Android, Arduino and HTML5 (2012)
  • Martti Marran – Generating Schematic Indoor Representation based on Context Monitoring Analysis of Mobile Users (2012)

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