An Embeddable Fusion Framework to Manage Context Information in Mobile Devices

Abstract

Conveniently fused and combined with data from external sources, information from sensors embedded in a mobile device may offer a dynamic view of the user’s situation, sufficient to build adaptive context-aware services. In order to shorten the development cycle of these applications, an embeddable framework to acquire, fuse and reason on context information is hereby described. ‘CASanDRA Mobile’ is designed to work autonomously in resource-constrained devices, offering to application developers a transparent management of context information. Based on a service-oriented architecture implemented in mobile OSGi, it offers a scalable infrastructure of bundles which decouple context acquisition and automate context inference from application development. ‘CASanDRA Mobile’ aims at providing the user with full control on his private context data, by using privacy policies suitable to handle P2P context sharing. To exemplify how to use the framework features, the design procedure for a context-aware wellness application is described.