A Re-configurable Context-Aware Engine for Mobile Devices

Despite the increasing request for intelligent applications with the heavy use of smart phone, little of them are available in daily life. One reason must be the high complexity of understanding user's situation. For application (app) developers, knowing user's context usually takes much more time and efforts than taking some useful actions. To help developing intelligent apps, we have proposed a mobile context-aware engine called Intelligent Mobile Platform (IMP). It provides user's current context to apps as a background service in android mobile phones. Especially, depending on user's current environments such as location, active apps, etc., IMP dynamically extends or shrinks its knowledge base. We believe that this dynamic reconfiguration is essential for mobile environment where user continuously changes his/her location and contexts. In this paper, we describe the reconfiguration part in detail. This feature is tested by three in-house apps with the IMP prototype on SAMSUNG Galaxy S II phone.

I. Introduction

The rapid growth of smart phones has been reshaping our daily life. Online world is being strongly tied to offline life. Today, it is common sight that young people chat with online friends while talking with nearby friends. This increasing unification of two worlds allows us to manage our life more efficiently. For instance, using the live positioning service of public transportations, people can save waiting time at bus stop. However, there is a quid pro quo. To benefit from this change, people have to pay attention to the useful weaving of offline and online worlds as well as to both worlds separately. Furthermore, this weaving - finding and using of right services or apps for the right situation, many of which occur repeatedly every day - has to be done manually.