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Current
mobile devices like mobile phones or personal digital assistants
have become more and more powerful; they already offer features
that only few users are able to exploit to their whole extent. With
a number of upcoming mobile multimedia applications, ease of use
becomes one of the most important aspects. One way to improve usability
is to make devices aware of the user's context, allowing them to
adapt to the user instead of forcing the user to adapt to the device.
Our work is taking this approach one step further by not only reacting
to the current context, but also predicting future context, hence
making the devices proactive. Mobile devices are generally suited
well for this task because they are typically close to the user
even when not actively in use. This allows such devices to monitor
the user context and act accordingly, like automatically muting
ring or signal tones when the user is in a meeting or selecting
audio, video or text communication depending on the user's current
occupation. This article presents an architecture that allows mobile
devices to continuously recognize current and anticipate future
user context. The major challenges are that context recognition
and prediction should be embedded in mobile devices with limited
resources, that learning and adaptation should happen on-line without
explicit training phases and that user intervention should be kept
to a minimum with non-obtrusive user interaction. To accomplish
this, the presented architecture consists of four major parts: feature
extraction, classification, labeling and prediction. The available
sensors provide a multi-dimensional, highly heterogeneous input
vector as input to the classification step, realized by data clustering.
Labeling associates recognized context classes with meaningful names
specified by the user, and prediction allows forecasting future
user context for proactive behavior.
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