The context aware personal remote control: a case study on context awareness

Modern mobile devices generate a lot of frustration because they cry out for our attention, however, incapable of doing it in the socially acceptable way. The major reason for such handicapped behaviour is that these devices are blind and deaf to the instant situation of the user. To improve this situation research in context awareness targets at making intelligent systems and devices sensitive to the context of use so that they can adapt their behaviour dependent on the context cues such as identity of the user, state of the environment and application status. In this paper we describe our research on context awareness applied to a Personal Remote Control (PRC). The PRC presents TV program reminders and suggestions in an adaptive way dependent on the situation of use. By using sensor based context awareness we strived to make the PRC behaviour appropriate to the situation and to prevent missing a program reminder due to communication failure.