Context-Awareness on Mobile Devices - the Hydrogen Approach

  • Authors:

  • Thomas Hofer;Wieland Schwinger;Mario Pichler;Gerhard Leonhartsberger;Josef Altmann;Werner Retschitzegger

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • HICSS '03 Proceedings of the 36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'03) - Track 9 - Volume 9
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Information about the user's environment offers newopportunities and exposes new challenges in terms oftime-aware, location-aware, device-aware andpersonalized applications. Such applications constantlyneed to monitor the environment - called context - toallow the application to react accordingly to this context.Context-awareness is especially interesting in mobilescenarios where the context of the application is highlydynamic and allows the application to deal with theconstraints of mobile devices in terms of presentation andinteraction abilities and communication restrictions.Current context-aware applications often realizesensing of context information in an ad hoc manner. Theapplication programmer needs to deal with the supply ofthe context information including the sensing of theenvironment, its interpretation and its disposal for furtherprocessing in addition to the primary purpose of theapplication. The close interweavement of device specificcontext handling with the application obstructs its reusewith other hardware configurations.Recently, architectures providing support for context-awareapplications have been developed. Up to now sucharchitectures are not trimmed to the special requirementsof mobile devices regarding particularly the limitations ofnetwork connections, limited computing power and thecharacteristics of mobile users.This paper proposes an architecture and a softwareframework - the Hydrogen Context-Framework - whichsupport context-awareness for considering theseconstraints. It is extensible to consider all kind of contextinformation and comprises a layered architecture.To prove the feasibility the framework has beenimplemented to run on mobile devices. A context-awarepostbox is realized to demonstrate the capabilities of theframework.