RoutineMaker: Towards end-user automation of daily routines using smartphones

People use smartphones in daily activities for accessing and storing information in various situations. In this paper, we present a work in progress for detecting and automating some of these activities. To explore the possible patterns we developed an experimental application to detect daily tasks used by smartphones and analyzed it to provide suggestions for “routines”. We conducted a two-week user study with 10 users to evaluate the approach. During the study the application logged the usage patterns, sent information to the server where it was analysed and clustered. The participants could also automate their smartphone tasks using the analysed data. The findings suggest that people would be willing to automatize tasks given that the approach gives flexibility and expressiveness without too much information overload. Future work includes refining the algorithms based on the gathered real-life data and modifying the interaction design to approach the challenges found with the initial study.