A framework for mobile context-aware applications

This paper presents a framework for the rapid development of context-aware applications for mobile devices. We introduce the concept of a context fingerprint which is a characterisation of the context that a mobile terminal can determine from the sensors available to it. These sensors not only include the obvious RF transmitters such as Wi-Fi, GSM and Bluetooth, but also any device state information that is accessible through the operating system's APIs, such as device profile or battery level. The proposed framework allows a number of context fingerprints to be defined, together with events and actions that are fired on transition between contexts. Context-aware applications can be created simply by defining the key elements in a mark-up script that is loaded into an implementation of this framework.