Supporting context-aware mobile applications: an infrastructure approach

Mobile phones and PDAs are converging into mobile lifestyle devices that offer a wide range of applications to end users. Many of these applications will have the ability to adapt themselves to the user´s situation, commonly referred to as context awareness. We argue that an infrastructure is needed to enable wide deployment of context-aware applications. A major benefit is interoperability between heterogeneous context sources and applications in a privacy-sensitive way. We identify three main technical challenges to realize such an infrastructure: reasoning to infer higher-level and better quality context information; efficient exchange and distributed processing of context information in dynamic and pervasive environments; and end-user-controlled handling of the privacy aspects. This article explains how we address these challenges with regard to the realization of an infrastructure that supports context-aware mobile applications. We use this infrastructure to support several mobile healthcare applications