Activity-oriented context adaptation in mobile applications

Abstract

Although usability of mobile devices increases steadily, use of mobile applications is still inconvenient. Adapting application behavior and functionality to the user's current needs is a promising approach to compensate for limited input capabilities. Despite great effort in research, smart adaptable applications are still rare. With our approach, we build upon existing works and extend them with the notion of activity context. Activities are one of the most basic elements of context and are well suited to determine the relevance of context entities in a given situation. Such information can be used to realize more intelligent suggestion mechanisms for input elements in mobile applications. The feasibility of our approach has been proven by a prototype implementation of our Activity Awareness Architecture for the Android platform providing activity context for mobile applications and a context-aware calendar on top of it demonstrating the usefulness of activity context. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.