A Decentralized System for Privacy-Preserving Context Exchange: Facilitating a Better Work-Life Balance

In recent times, the working society has been plagued by a work-life imbalance as a result of the added flexibility introduced by advanced information and communication technology. A technically viable approach to improve one´s work-life balance is to control the communication mediums depending on the respective user contexts, and consequently help the users maintain their concentration. To achieve this, an important prerequisite is the efficient exchange of context information among the users. Therefore, this paper motivates a novel decentralized approach which facilitates context data exchange as per prevailing conditions on privacy and confidentiality. We discuss the governing criteria surrounding user contexts and draw the main design challenges with respect to the proposed system, accordingly.