Abstract
<p class="0abstract">Building context-aware mobile applications is one of the most ambitious areas of research. Such applications can change their behavior according to context or perform specific tasks in specific contexts. Regardless of the application, all context-aware mobile applications share the need to retrieve and process context information. This paper presents a Context Management tool for the Android platform (ACM). ACM allows easy access to internal on-board mobile sensors and hardware features extracting corresponding raw data. Raw context is processed into higher-level more human-readable context that is provided seamlessly to the mobile applications. Different methods are used for this purpose including fuzzy classifiers. Since different mobiles have different sensors and hardware features, ACM can adapt to the mobile device by deactivating access to unavailable ones. Information regarding the available sensors and hardware features and their specifications can also be queried. Additionally, applications can request notifications regarding context change or specific context values. In addition to providing developers with supporting classes and methods, ACM is accompanied by an application that allows developers to examine its functionality and capabilities before using it. The application can be also used to examine the readings of the different sensors in different situations and thus calibrate them as needed. Additionally, it can be used to modify and personalize default interpretations of raw context values to high-level ones. ACM has been tested empirically and the results show extreme interest of context-aware mobile application developers in its promising capabilities and that it is conducive to facilitating, speeding up and triggering development of many more of such applications.</p>
Highlights
Smartphones have become an essential part of our daily life
This paper presents an Android Context Management (ACM) tool that provides a set of classes and methods that facilitate access to raw context values to save developers such trouble so that they can concentrate on the main functionalities of their applications
As shown in the table, the developers believe that ACM is efficient and easy to use, does not have a long learning curve and they would readily use it in developing context-aware mobile applications in the future
Summary
Smartphones have become an essential part of our daily life. numerous applications have been and are being developed for smartphones. Accessing internal on-board mobile sensors and other hardware features is an essential task in most applications. This is especially true in case of context-aware mobile applications whose behavior depend on the context obtained via such sensors and hardware features [1]. The problem is that this hard and time-consuming task has to be repeated with almost every context-aware mobile application. Many developers limit the number of manipulated sensors and mobile features merely due to the time constraints [2]. This paper presents an Android Context Management (ACM) tool that provides a set of classes and methods that facilitate access to raw context values to save developers such trouble so that they can concentrate on the main functionalities of their applications. It is worth noting that we considered the Android operating system in particular due to its popularity in comparison to other smartphone operating systems and because Android itself is Java based and open source
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