Combining lively sensed bubbles into sparkling applications

Sensor-driven applications typically analyze sensor data to check whether certain conditions are met and then execute actions accordingly. Creating such applications is often a work of precision as the developer must deal with diverse sensor sources (e.g. built-in hardware or networked sensors), fuzziness of sensor data (e.g. inferring movement from location coordinates), reuse of sensors in different contexts, etc. Moreover, inefficient use of sensor subscriptions can rapidly drain the battery of a mobile device. To better deal with these difficulties, we present the concept of sensor bubbles and sparks: pieces of meaningful sensor data that bubble up in an environment and trigger new application states. By adding OSGi-alike management features to bubbles and sparks, we show how they can be leveraged to build powerful sensor-driven applications.