CONTEXT-AWARE COMPUTING

RUBY ELJUSE

Seventh Semester

Department of Computer Science

M G College of Engineering

[email protected]

Abstract-There is a growing interest in the use of context- Another definition for context is
awareness as a technique for developing pervasive
computing applications that are flexible, adaptable, and “the set of environmental states and settings that either
capable of acting autonomously on behalf of users. determines an application’s behavior or in which an
However, context-awareness introduces various software application event occurs and is interesting to the user”.
engineering challenges, as well as privacy and usability
The context is further classified into two external and
concerns. In this paper, I present technical aspects of
internal contexts. The external refers to context that can be
context-aware computing (systems), a conceptual
measured by hardware sensors, i.e., location, light, sound,
framework, its few applications and some drawbacks.
movement, touch, temperature or air pressure, whereas the
internal is mostly specified by the user or captured by
monitoring user interactions, i.e., the user’s goals, tasks,
I. INTRODUCTION work context, business processes, the user’s emotional
state. Most context-aware systems make use of external
With the appearance and penetration of mobile devices
context factors as they provide useful data, such as location
such as notebooks, PDAs, and smart phones, pervasive (or
information.
ubiquitous) systems are becoming increasingly popular
these days. The term ‘pervasive’ introduced first by Weiser II. HISTORY
(1991) refers to the seamless integration of devices into the
users everyday life. Appliances should vanish into the The concept ‘context-aware computing’ is emerged out of
background to make the user and his tasks the central focus ubiquitous computing research at Xerox PARC in the early
rather than computing devices and technical issues. One 1990s. The term ‘context-aware’ was first b Schilit and
field in the wide range of pervasive computing is the so- Theimer in 1994 in their paper Disseminating Active Map
called context-aware systems. Information to Mobile Hosts where they describe a model
of computing in which users interact with different mobile
Several authors gave definitions for the term ‘context’. One and stationary computers and classify context-aware
of the accurate definitions is given by Dey and Abowd. systems as one that can adapt according to its location of
They refer to context as use, the collection of nearby people and objects, as well as
the changes to those objects over time over the coarse of
“any information that can be used to characterize the
the day.
situation of entities (i.e., whether a person, place or
object)”.
 III.CONTEXT-AWARE COMPUTING The first layer consists of a collection of different sensors.
It is notable that the word ‘sensor’ not only refers to
Context-aware computing refers to a general class of sensing hardware but also to ever data source which may
mobile systems that can sense their physical environment. provide usable context information. Concerning the way
Otherwise context-aware systems are able to adapt their data is captured; sensors can be classified in three groups:
operations to the current context without explicit user
intervention and thus aim at increasing usability and • Physical sensors: The most frequently used type
effectiveness by taking environmental context into account. of sensors are physical sensors. They are actually
Such systems are a component of a ubiquitous computing hardware sensors for capturing physical data such
or pervasive computing environment. Three important as light, noise, temperature etc. Many hardware
aspects of context are: (1) where you are; (2) who you are sensors are available nowadays which are capable
with; and (3) what resources are nearby. Context-aware of capturing almost any physical data. Table
computing are categorized into two types based on the way shows some examples of physical sensors.
of using the context i.e., as active context or passive
context. Active context influences the behavior of the • Virtual sensors: Virtual sensors source context
application. Passive context is a context that is relevant but data from software applications or services. For
not critical. The two types are: example, it is possible to determine an
employee’s location not only by using tracking
Active context awareness: an application automatically
systems (physical sensors) but also by virtual
adapts to discovered context, by changing the application’s
sensors. Other context attributes that can be
behavior.
sensed by virtual sensors include, e.g., the user’s
activity by checking for mouse movement and
Passive context awareness: an application presents the new
keyboard input.
or updated context to an interested user or makes the
context persistent for the user to retrieve later.
• Logical sensors: These sensors are the
combination of both physical and virtual sensors.
They are used for solving higher tasks. For
IV. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK example, a logical sensor can be constructed to
detect an employee’s current position by
The following layered conceptual architecture, as depicted
analyzing logins at desktop PC’s and a database
in Figure, augments layers for detecting and using context
mapping of devices to location information.
by adding interpreting and reasoning functionality.
The second layer is responsible for the retrieval of raw
Application
context data. It makes use of appropriate drivers for
Storage/Management physical, virtual and logical sensors.

Preprocessing
The third layer is the preprocessing layer and is responsible
Raw data retrieval for reasoning and interpreting contextual information. The
preprocessing layer is not implemented in every context-
Sensors
aware system but may offer useful information if the raw
Figure: Layered conceptual framework for CWC data are too coarse grained. In this layer, single context
atoms can be combined to high level information and this
process is called aggregation or composition.
Table: Commonly used physical sensor types There are many applications evolved from the concept of
context-aware computing. From these applications, only
Type of Available sensors
three important ones are listed below.
context

Light Photodiodes, color sensors, IR and UV A. Xerox PARCTAB:

sensors etc.
The PARTAB is a small hand held device which
Visual context Various cameras uses an infrared-based cellular network for

Audio Microphones communication. The tab acts as a graphics

terminal. For input, the tab has three finger-
Motion, Mercury switches, angular sensors,
operated buttons on the grip and a touch sensitive
acceleration accelerometers, motion detectors,
screen. For output, the tab has a 128x64 pixel
magnetic fields
display and a piezo-electric speaker. It was
Location Outdoor: Global positioning System developed from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
(GPS), Global System for Mobile It shows information about user location, people
Communications (GSM); Indoor: Active and hardware nearby etc. That is, it helps the users
Badge system, etc to find the nearby local resources, for example,

Touch Touch sensors implemented in mobile nearest printer. PARCTAB can also be used as a

devices remote control which controls changed depending

on context lights, temperature, TV, radio, moving
Temperature Thermometers
display windows. The problems with PARCTAB
Physical Biosensors to measure skin resistance, are its small size, small window and more power
attributes blood pressure consumption.

Figure: Xerox PARCTAB

The fourth layer is Storage and Management layer which

organizes the gathered data, and offers them via a public
interface to the client. Clients may gain access in two
different ways, synchronous and asynchronous. In the
synchronous manner, the client sends a message requesting
some kind of offered data and pauses until it receives the
server’s answer. The asynchronous mode, the client sends
messages to server and performs other operations rather
than waiting for the server’s response. In the majority of
cases the asynchronous approach is more suitable due to
rapid changes in the underlying context.

The client is realized in the fifth layer, the Application

layer. The actual reaction on different events and context-
instances is implemented here.

V. APPLICATIONS B. Active Badge System:

It is one of the first context-aware systems. It was
developed from Olivetti Research Lab in 90’s.
The application area of active badge system is
how to locate a person. For example, at a hospital
if a doctor needed for an emergency or in an
office if a person missing from a meeting.
Another application is call forwarding. In call
forwarding, the location context is presented to
the receptionist, who routinely forwards the
telephone calls to the destination user’s nearest
phone. The working of active badge system is: it
emits unique code or IR signals at every 15
seconds. This code or signals is picked up by the
sensor network in the building. The master station
(work station) polls sensors for finding the Figure: Active Badge System

location of users (sightings) and thereby providing

C. Cyber Guide:
location of users.

Cyber Guide is a mobile context-aware tour guide

The drawbacks of active badge system are:
(indoors and outdoors). It was developed by
• Less battery power Georgia Tech. It provides information services to
a tourist about user’s current location; for example
Solution: provide short signals and user can find directions, retrieve background
after every 15 seconds, switches off information. The travel diary is automatically
automatically. recorded using the history of where a tourist has
traveled over time, and it is used by the system to
• Privacy concerns
make suggestions on places of interest to visit.
Solution: Badge owners could just The location information is collected by GPS for
take it off and leave it on their desk. the outdoor version, and by an infrared (IR)
positioning system, for the indoor version.
 D) Context awareness: Accuracy.

This includes two issues: one is if the context data is

missing and second one is if the context information is
inaccurate. In the first issue, the operation is just dropped
out and in the second one, the context-aware systems
provide throughput according to the gathered context
information.

VII. CONCLUSION

In this paper, I described the term context and context

Figure: Cyber Guide
awareness, its conceptual framework, listed the three
important context-aware applications that have been built
and major issues. Many of the context-aware systems lack
security options. Every system and framework uses its own
format to describe context and its own communication
mechanisms. But yet, it’s believed that context awareness is
the key factor for new applications in the area of pervasive
computing. I believe, however, that context awareness is a
key factor for new applications in the area of ubiquitous
computing.

Figure: Cyber Guide Map Information (Outdoor)

VIII. REFERENCES
VI. DRAWBACKS OF CONEXT-AWARE SYSTEMS
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/context-
There are several drawbacks for context-aware systems and
aware_prevasive_systems.
they are listed below.
2. A Survey on Context-Aware Systems: Matthias
A) General: security, privacy. Baldaf and Schahram Dustdar and Florian
Rosenberg.
Context-aware systems never provide privacy to the users
since it is used for location specification. Also no security 3. A Software Engineering Framework for Context-
measures are provided for storing the contextual Aware Pervasive Computing: Karen Henricksen
information in such systems. and Jadwiga Indulska.

Wireless: Range, signal detection. 4. Context-Aware Computing Applications: Bill N.

Schilit, Norman Adams, and Roy Want.
B) Higher energy consumption and require more data
storage and data processing. 5. A Survey on Context-Aware Mobile Computing
Research: Guanling Chen and David Kotz.
C) More expensive.