Lau, S: Towards a user-centric context aware system: empower

Context awareness is a research area that aims to utilise contexts to ease a user's tasks and hence fulfil his needs. Newer and more innovative approaches in different aspects, such as communications, human-computer interactions, applications and systems have been investigated and proposed to enable the acquisition of implicit information from available sensor data. This information, commonly defined as context, supports context aware systems to act and react based on the available contexts and their changes.

In getting user acceptance for the proposed approaches and ideas based on context awareness, it is important to ensure that the target realisations, both software and hardware, are user-centric. The hardware devices should be seamlessly integrated in the users' environment, without requiring them to make noticeable adjustments or even compromise their daily lives. From the software point of view, users should be given means for adequate understanding and overview of a context aware system as well as sufficient control for potential creation, modification and management of the desired services and functions. We name the envisioned system a user-centric
context aware system.

With this motivation, this book presents the proposal to use a smartphone with its built-in accelerometer as an example solution for the envisioned system. The possibilities of using a smartphone to enable recognition of basic activities are discussed, such as walking, going up the staircase, sitting etc. The proposal is tested experimentally via evaluations on real data obtained from 15 test users. The evaluations investigate factors and techniques that are deemed applicable and suitable for the vision of an unobtrusive user-centric context aware system.