Towards building mobile device that behaves according to contexts

Abstract

Misbehaviors (e.g. ringing loudly in the middle of a lecture) of mobile phone systems have been increasingly become a disturbing and almost hazard social phenomena. This is simply because existing mobile phone systems including those so called smart-phones do not have a proper computational mechanism which enables them to dynamically adjust their behaviors according to specific contexts (the user of) the mobile phone may be in (such as in a meeting or in a lecture). In this paper, we discuss a context-based approach to automatic regulation of mobile phone behaviors and its initial experimenting implementation on a major mobile phone platform. In this method, various kinds of phone behaviors are articulated and represented in an ontological model. A mobile-phone specific contextual model is also developed to specify taxonomy of the situations the cell phone may reside in. The two models are integrated in the form of semantic network in which they are connected by two kinds of inferential relationships: enable and disable. The preliminary experiments have demonstrated the promising potential of the approach.