MobiCon: Mobile context monitoring platform: Incorporating context-awareness to smartphone-centric personal sensor networks

In this demonstration, we will show MobiCon, a context monitoring platform; it runs over smartphones and sensor OSs, and facilitates development and deployment of everyday context-aware applications. For many years, lots of research efforts have been made in building low-cost, yet effective sensor networks for various application domains such as structural health monitoring of bridges, disaster recovery, automated ventilation of buildings. Integration of sensors into smartphones and the advent of wearable devices open a new opportunity for mobile applications to leverage in-situ user contexts such as his/her location, activity, social relationship, health status. In recent studies of mobile and pervasive computing, a number of useful mobile context-aware applications have been proposed, but their actual deployment is slow due to complexity of context processing and heavy resource and battery usage. To address such challenges, we have been building MobiCon for many years, upon which diverse context-aware applications are developed and deployed without concerns about complexity of context processing and resource optimization.

I. Introduction

Smartphones are close to their owners almost 24/7, longer than close friends or family. They have inherent opportunities to catch users' situations and contexts better than anyone else. Such opportunities are increasingly realized with recent integration of sensors into smartphones. Today's smartphones embed diverse sensing modules such as camera, microphone, accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS. Sensing capabilities will be further enriched with the aid of a variety of wearable sensors and nearby space-embedded ones. With such sensors, smartphones will be aware of in-situ user contexts in real-time, such as activity, location, emotion, health, and surroundings.