Personalization for unobtrusive service interaction

Abstract

Increasingly, mobile devices play a key role in the communication between users and the services embedded in their environment. With ever greater number of services added to our surroundings, there is a need to personalize services according to the user needs and environmental context avoiding service behavior from becoming overwhelming. In order to prevent this information overload, we present a method for the development of mobile services that can be personalized in terms of obtrusiveness (the degree in which each service intrudes the user’s mind) according to the user needs and preferences. That is, services can be developed to provide their functionality at different obtrusiveness levels depending on the user by minimizing the duplication of efforts. On the one hand, we provide mechanisms for describing the obtrusiveness degree required for a service. On the other hand, we make use of Feature Modeling techniques in order to define the obtrusiveness level adaptation in a declarative manner. An experiment was conducted in order to put in practice the proposal and evaluate the user acceptance for the personalization capabilities provided by our approach.