Context aware hand-held devices: Licentiate thesis

The need to build devices that are more context aware has recently emerged. The motivation is to make devices easier to use on one hand, and decrease the information overload on the other. Context awareness should be helpful because it provides information to the device without bothering the user. In this thesis we concentrate on the context awareness of hand-held devices. Hand-held devices have special needs in the user interface, as they are small in size and fairly weak in performance. Moreover, they should also be easy to use while walking or doing something else. In the theoretical part of this thesis we analyze the possibilities that hand-held devices have for obtaining and exploiting contextual information. We propose use-case modeling and interaction scenarios to be used in revealing the potential use for context awareness. We also discuss the similarities between context awareness and agents. In the constructive part of the thesis we implement a general purpose sensor box which we use for increasing the context awareness of an example device. In the experiment we evaluate the theoretical ideas to gain hands-on experience of the practical problems involved in increasing context awareness of hand-held devices. Research into context awareness has been rather limited, especially in applying theories to practice. Research prototypes that use sensor information as a base of user interface operations have been built without much concern for the underlying principles. In this thesis we propose a theory for context awareness and show how it is used in practice.