User role in adaptive mobile services

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User role in adaptive mobile services

• Eija Kaasinen, VTT Technical Research Centre of
  Finland
• ADAMOS Seminar 15.6.2007, Oulu

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Contents

• Context-awareness
• Elements of context
• Possible user roles with context-awareness
• 2 case studies from VTT research
• Kontti project A framework for user-defined
  contexts
• MIMOSA project Tag-based context activation
• Conclusions and future work items

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Context-awareness

• A system is context-aware if it uses context to
  provide relevant information and/or services to
  the user, where relevancy depends on the user's
  task (Dey, 2001)
• User interaction is eased the user has quick
  access to the information or services that (s)he
  needs in his/her current context of use. The
  services can even be invoked and the information
  provided to the user automatically.
• Essential in mobile services where the context
  may change continuously

• Two primary challenges
• Identifying the context
• Predicting what the user wants in the identified
  context

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Context elements and dealing with them

• Environment
• Technical (devices and services in use and
  available)
• Physical (place, location coordinates)
• Ambient (e.g. temperature, noise, lightness)
• Social (e.g. cultural environment, people near
  by)
• Time (including date season)
• User
• Abilities, skills, knowledge, habits, feelings ..
• What the user has in mind, where his/her
  attention is
• Tasks
• What the user is doing, has been doing, plans to
  do

• Challenge for identifying the context
• All the elements of the context cannot be
  measured
• Challenges for predicting what the user wants in
  the identified context
• Are the relevancies of an individual user the
  same in similar contexts?
• How to learn to know the relevancies?
• Could the relevancies be generalised within user
  groups?

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Possible user roles with context-awareness

• Defining and sharing contexts
• Defining contexts
• Associating relevancies (content, objects and
  actions) with contexts
• Publishing and sharing contexts
• Accepting or refining automatically identified
  contexts
• Teaching context recognition software

• Utilising contexts
• Activating context
• Sharing presence information with others
• Context-aware communication

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• Case Kontti A framework for user-defined contexts

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User-defined contexts
Case Kontti

• Users should be able to define contexts
  themselves from the very beginning
• The creation of new contexts should be very
  straightforward in order to encourage users to
  use this feature

Creating a manually activated context and
publishing it to two users with a public name and
description.

• Automatically activated user defined contexts
  can be based on measured context data such as
  location and time.
• However, often it is beneficial that the user
  can him/herself activate the context. In
  particular, user-controlled context-awareness may
  better obtain users' acceptance and thus
  facilitate the adoption of the services.

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Kontti framework for user-defined contexts
Case Kontti
The target of the Kontti platform is to offer the
users a possibility to define, utilize and share
contexts.

• Contextual content for personal use and for
  sharing with others
• Contexts as social media associating and
  publishing contexts with friends and groups.
• Context-based messages

The framework aims to enable flexibility in
combining contexts, objects and messages by
user.
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Associating contexts with objects and messages
Case Kontti

• The user can associate contexts with different
  kinds of context objects.

Personal contexts (Zones), and views to objects
related to a currently active context Work

• Context-aware messages used to share contexts and
  objects

Sending a context-aware message includes defining
target context and the way of reception by
others, e.g. one by one or to everyone as one
user gets to the zone
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User evaluation
Case Kontti

• evaluation In two separate 4-6 week field trials
  with 27 (1314) test users
• idea to evaluate how user-defined contexts can
  be associated with other users, friends and
  groups
• equipment the Kontti service via Nokia 3650
  smart phones
• interaction Users made illustrative descriptions
  of their contexts, for example, what they were
  doing and what kind of mood they were in. The
  users were able to see at a glance whether their
  friends were available for contact or nearby. The
  users viewed each others contexts (zones)
  quite frequently and were willing to inform peer
  groups about their presence status. The published
  context were also used as triggers to get
  response from others, such as one mood-based
  context Life sucks.
• what is context location, time, mood

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VTT TECHNICAL RESEARCH CENTRE OF FINLAND
Case Kontti

• RESULTS
• While location was seen an important part of a
  context, a verbal description and free naming
  give the user a feeling of more control and an
  opportunity to express him/herself.
• Fuzzy presence verbal description allows the
  user to depict his present state with any degree
  of accuracy
• The importance of viewpoint
• This is not tracking by location.
• This is not information that is extracted from
  you.
• BUT information you yourself communicate to
  others.
• Communication with people you would not send a
  message to.

Conveying your own context as depicted in the
movies A grandfather clock shows where each
person is. (Harry Potter and the Chamber of
Secrets. Warner Bros.)
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• Case MIMOSA Tag-based context activation

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Case MIMOSA Tag-based context activation
Case MIMOSA

• idea context tags activate context-based
  services or actions within an application
• equipment RFID tags and a mobile device with a
  tag reader
• interaction a tag is read by touching (or
  pointing at) the tag with the mobile device or
  the tag is identified automatically from a
  distance
• action a related service/action is activated
• what is context the tag indicates the
  environment or the physical object near by.
  General contexts and contexts within active
  applications.

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Case MIMOSA Tag-based context activation
Case MIMOSA

• small-scale field evaluation with 6 users
• three contexts a bus stop, a parking place and
  comparing products
• results
• the concept easily understood
• the users quickly learned to use the system
• user control was appreciated
• future possibilities more flexibility to context
  recognition by measuring the distance or
  direction of tagged objects

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The Mobile Guide for City Travellers (KAMO)

• The Mobile Guide for City Travellers (KAMO) is a
  new mobile application that offers journey
  planning and stop-specific timetable information.
• The service is based on Near Field Communication
  (NFC) technology.
• Touching the RFID tag with a mobile phone opens
  the application on the phone's display without
  the user having to access it separately via the
  menu.

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Conclusions and future work items

• Our experiences encourage to further facilitate
  active user contribution to the definition of
  contexts and context-aware behavior.
• The emerging social media phenomenon that
  emphasizes the role of the users as both content
  producers and consumers will contribute well
  towards that goal.
• Contexts have potential to become part of social
  media User can create and share contexts
• Automatic context recognition can be complemented
  with user initiated context activation or user
  validation of identified context
• Group contexts what groups of people do and how
  they feel
• Could be based on automatic monitoring, voting or
  user-allowed access to private data

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Thank you! Questions?

• More information
• MIMOSA project
• http//www.mimosa-fp6.com/
• Kolari, J. et al. 2004. Context-Aware Services
  for Mobile Users. Technology and User
  Experiences. VTT Publications 539.
  http//www.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/publications/2004/P539.
  pdf
• www.vtt.fi/hti
• Eija.Kaasinen_at_vtt.fi