Practical Context Awareness for GSM Cell Phones

The ability to provide context aware behaviour on a cell phone such as whether a user is walking or driving has previously only been possible via the use of additional hardware sensors such as an accelerometer. In this paper we show that by using GSM data such as signal strength fluctuation and changes to the monitored neighbouring cells it is possible to distinguish between various states of movement such as walking, driving in a motor car and remaining stationary. We demonstrate how the calibration of the cell phone for use in a given environment can be implemented in an automatic and unsupervised manner, and that we can achieve a classification accuracy of around 80%.