Collaborative and GPS Sensing for Waiting Time Prediction on Service Queues through Smartphones

Mobile computing may improve pervasively user experience through context perception. In this paper, we exercise a prediction service for waiting time on service queues using only GPS information and a little user collaboration (“are you on a queue?”) - this combination may be used by the vast majority of current mobile phones, once it does not require sophisticated sensing (such as accelerometers and other stuff). In our proof of concept, we achieve a less than 1 minute predicting error on monitoring a minimarket queue service. There results suggest that our tool may be useful and can be extended for other scenarios based on different classes of service queues.