User-Centered Approaches to Context Awareness: Prospects and Challenges

Abstract

Context awareness has gained increasing recognition as one of the emerging technologies for the next generation of personal ubiquitous computing. Recent advancements in mobile computing technologies have paved the way for alternative frameworks that enabled the embedding or cueing of user context into the design and development of context-aware applications. This chapter contributes to the current understanding of the role of the user context in the acquisition and presentation of context information. In particular, it explores proposed approaches and methods for representing the user context in defining context awareness. Ultimately, coupling context awareness with user context of interest may provide a promising approach to the development and deployment of effective context-aware applications.