The recent improvements in mobile technologies are fostering the
emergence of ubiquitous environments in which the user is able to
access, create and share information at any location with considerable
ease. Moreover, mobile devices have become an essential part of
distributed architectures that can be used for monitoring the context
of the user (e.g. location, situation, etc.), and thus reacting in a
proactive way. On the other hand, smart phones are equipped with a
variety of sensors (GPS, magnetic field, etc.) that enrich the mobile
applications with location awareness and sensing capabilities. These
advances enable fitting contextual requirements for improving the
quality of service (QoS) in the applications as it allows adapting the
interaction between the handset and the user in real-time. For example,
a sensor such as the accelerometer is used for sensing how the user
is holding the handset, and thus changing the position of the screen
as a result.
The accelerometer is a sensing element that
measures the acceleration associated with the positioning of a weight
in which it has been embedded (e.g. a mobile device). Depending on the
number of axes, it can gather the acceleration information across
multiple dimensions. In the case of a triaxial accelerometer that is
the most common in mobiles from vendors such as HTC, Samsung, Nokia
etc., the acceleration can be sensed on three axes (x, y and z). The
axes are related with the movements forward/backward, left/right and
up/down, respectively. For example: in the case of a runner, up/down
is measured as the crouching when he/she is warming up before starting
to run, forward/backward is related with speeding up and slowing
down, and left/right involves making turns while he/she is running.
Research staff
- Assoc. Prof. Dr. Satish Narayana Srirama
- Huber Flores
- Siim Puniste
Publications
Master theses
Kaarel Hanson – Context Sensor Data on Demand for Mobile Users Supported by XMPP (2012)