Supporting Context-aware Mobile Applications: an Infrastructure Approach

Mobile phones and PDAs are converging into mobile lifestyle devices that offer a wide range of applications to end-users. An important class of these applications will have the ability to adapt themselves to the user's situation, commonly referred to as context-awareness. We argue that an infrastructure is needed to enable wide deployment of context-aware applications. A major benefit is interoperability between heterogeneous context sources and applications in a privacy-sensitive way. We identify three main technical challenges to realize such an infrastructure: (i) reasoning to infer higher-level and better quality context information, (ii) efficient exchange and distributed processing of context information in dynamic and pervasive environments, and (iii) end-user controlled handling of the privacy aspects. This paper explains how we address these challenges in the realization of an infrastructure that supports context-aware mobile applications. We use this infrastructure to support several mobile healthcare applications.