Energy-Efficient and Context-Aware Smartphone Sensor Employment

New-generation mobile devices will inevitably be employed within the realm of ubiquitous sensing. In particular, smartphones have been increasingly used for human activity recognition (HAR)-based studies. It is believed that recognizing human-centric activity patterns could accurately enough give a better understanding of human behaviors. Further, such an ability could have a chance to assist individuals to enhance the quality of their lives. However, the integration and realization of HAR-based mobile services stand as a significant challenge on resource-constrained mobile-embedded platforms. In this manner, this paper proposes a novel discrete-time inhomogeneous hidden semi-Markov model (DT-IHS-MM)-based generic framework to address a better realization of HAR-based mobile context awareness. In addition, we utilize power-efficient sensor management strategies by providing three intuitive methods and constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), as well as partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP)-based optimal methods. Moreover, a feedback control mechanism is integrated to balance the tradeoff between accuracy in context inference and power consumption. In conclusion, the proposed sensor management methods achieve a 40% overall enhancement in the power consumption caused by the physical sensor with respect to the overall 85–90% accuracy ratio due to the provided adaptive context inference framework.