A User-centered Approach to Context-awareness in Mobile Computing

Context-aware computing is aimed to make mobile devices smarter by giving them the ability to recognize and interpret the surrounding environment and react proactively and intelligently. However, the development and deployment of context-aware mobile artifacts are still at their infancy, with few theories and little empirical evidence about how to develop an effective context-aware mobile application. In this article, we propose a user-centered approach for obtaining and parsing context, driven by users´ context of interest that offers more interactive and construed context to users. We seek to reduce the complexity of the traditional sensor-based infrastructure context acquisition and interpretation, by leveraging the natural dialogue between the users and their mobile devices. Hence, emphasize the value of such dialogue over the users´ ordinary situational- context to gradually build their own context and context- awareness profiles. We present a conceptual framework for our approach, and illustrate the usage of this framework through applied scenarios.