M. Zheng et al.
• Time context, such as time of a day, week, month, and season of the year.
Combining several context values may generate a more useful understanding of the state of some environment.
For example, knowing the current location and current time, together with the user’s calendar, an application
might better understand the user’s current social situation (in a meeting, in class, waiting in the airport, or in a
similar situation). The efforts made to utilize context for enhancing computer interaction have developed into
the field of context-aware computing. The primary objective of this field is to improve software. Recent techno-
logical improvements have caused the field to evolve greatly.
This project will study context-awareness in depth, specifically on collecting and disseminating context.
There are two mobile applications developed in this study which are aimed at exploring the potential usages of
context-aware computing in the real world. One is a campus guide system. The other is automatically adjusting
the smart phone status. The two applications collect the context-information via various built-in sensors and up-
date their functionalities according to dynamic context.
There are two major platforms in the mobile device community: iOS and Android. This study chose Android
development mainly for the reason of its openness. In addition, all the tools in the Android development are free
and no special hardware is required [6]-[8].
Sections 2 and 3 will explain two applications in detail. Section 4 discusses related works. Section 5 summa-
rizes the current study and future work.
2. A Campus Guide System
This mobile application intends to provide information about a university campus to a tourist using his/her cur-
rent location. When the user opens the app in his/her mobile device, there will be a map showing the overall
view of the campus. The user can center the map over an area of interest, zoom in on that area to get detailed
information, or select one or more buildings in the campus to visit. The application will be able to navigate the
user to a point of interest. In addition, the user can obtain detailed information about a building, such as the
name, the services provided, the residing departments, and current events hosted in the building.
Figure 1 is a screen shot showing a map of the overview of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse campus.
The blue arrow is the user’s current location. The red circles are the points of the interest.
This application also provides the functionality of augmented reality. It augments the user’s view of the real
world, with additional virtual information. For example, current event information can be overlaid on a picture
of a building.
3. Automatically Adjust the Smart Phone
This application is developed as a service running in the background. There is only one user in this application,
the smart phone’s user/owner. The user will use his/her phone as usual. The application will automatically adjust
the status of the phone based on the user’s current location, the time of the day, etc.
The application identifies three different environments based on the user’s location: at work, at home and on
the go. The location information is obtained through the phone’s built-in GPS. Once the user installs the appli-
cation, he/she needs to register to set up an account for security reasons. Meanwhile, the user will provide
his/her email accounts at work and at home. After setting up an account, when the user starts the application for
the first time, the user needs to identify his/her office and home locations on the map.
When the application running in the background recognizes the user’s current location is at work, it will
change the wallpaper to be office background, set the ringtone’s volume to medium, and convert the email ac-
count setting to the office account. If there is an incoming call, the application will first check the user’s calen-
dar. If the user is currently having a meeting, the incoming call will be cut off, instead, a text message will be
sent from the user’s smart phone to the caller: “I am in a meeting”. When it is the time for lunch, the application
will list all the restaurants near the office with the phone number.
When the application running in the background recognizes the user’s current location is at home, it will
change the wallpaper to be a home background, set the ringtone’s volume to minimum, and convert the email
account setting to the home account. The application will also list the movies showing for the next few hours at
nearby cinemas after the user gets home.
Figure 2 shows the email account has been converted to the home account.
Figure 3 shows the received email from the user’s home account.
