All for One and One For All: Dynamic Injection of Situations in a Generic Context-Aware Application

In a new smart-world, users are getting accustomed to fast-responding applications that make their everyday tasks and daily life easier. In order to meet their expectancies, mobile applications are shifting towards a new era of context awareness. Nonetheless, it seems that context-aware applications are still struggling to provide the user with a real situation understanding. They only consider non-evolving limited scenarios and react to them using only generic services. To address these concerns, we have developed the Long Life Application, a dynamic context-aware situation-based distributed mobile application dedicated to assist end-users in their everyday needs. This application considers the requirements of the users and provides them with the appropriate services according to their current context. In this paper we focus in the way that the user’s context is considered by the application. We propose a hybrid approach that combines both high-level context (top-down approach), by injecting user-related context, and a low-level context (bottom-up approach), by inferring it from sensor data.