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.