Toward adopting self-organizing models for the gamification of context-aware user applications

Recent developments in the area of small and smart devices led to a massive spread of them, which, in some cases are replacing traditional computers for performing common activities such as web browsing. These devices are usually equipped with specialized hardware to sense and interact with the environment. In this context the use of self-organizing techniques has been widely used to provide adaptation capabilities at the low level, such as for optimizing energy consumption, or for providing some fault-tolerance properties to the communication middleware. What we want to show in this work is how the same self-organization principles can be used at the user-experience level of context-aware applications. The approach we propose shows that self-organization can be used to model the introduction of gaming elements to motivate and simplify the use of context-aware applications, thus leading to higher quality software. This work is finally validated using a case study and empirical evidence from existing popular context-aware applications.