Context-awareness in the wild: an investigation into the existing uses of context in everyday life

Authors:
Jason Pascoe;Kirsten Thomson;Helena Rodrigues
Affiliations:
Departamento de Sistemas de Informação, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal;The Usability Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand;Departamento de Sistemas de Informação, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal
Venue:
OTM'07 Proceedings of the 2007 OTM confederated international conference on On the move to meaningful internet systems - Volume Part I
Year:
2007

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Abstract

It is common for literature on context-awareness to focus on specific application domains or on the development of models and frameworks to facilitate context-awareness. In this study, however, we take a step back from such work in order to investigate how regular people may already be employing, or trying to employ, context-awareness in their everyday lives using existing mobile tools (such as mobile phones, paper notepads, etc.). We believe that an understanding of these existing real-world uses and needs of context-awareness will help to better inform and direct research efforts in this domain. Towards this aim we present the findings of a user study in which twelve randomly selected individuals recorded a diary on their use of mobile tools over the period of two days. The findings clearly demonstrate that people do indeed currently employ a wide variety of contexts and context-aware behaviours, albeit in a manner that is often imperfect and at a sub-conscious level.