Context Guide - Context and Location-Awareness for an Indoor Mobile Guide

Author(s):

  • Lara Alexandra dos Santos Carvalho Leite, Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

Source: M.Sc. Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico / Technical University of Lisbon, October 2010

Citation:

Keywords: Context-aware, Location, Wireless Local Area Networks, Indoor environment, Intelligent Agent, User’s relationships, Points of interest, Android.

Abstract:
The proliferation of mobile devices and wireless communications contributed to the development of context-aware applications. This work aims to develop a system that gathers users’ contextual information (their location, their relations with other users and interesting places) in indoor environments, and handles such information to help users in their daily tasks. Considering the costs and time of deployment, and to facilitate the propagation and integration of the overall system, we developed a location system for an indoor environment based on an existing Wireless Local Area Network. To handle the location information gathered by the system, we developed an interface hybrid agent that is aware of the user’s context (user’s location, user’s friends informations and points of interest in the environment). The agent infers the relationships between users by observing their interactions. To validate our initial hypothesis, we performed two experiments. The first experiment intended to measure the usefulness of the system to users. The latter experiment evaluates the accuracy of the estimated location. The results of these experiment indicate that users found the system useful, and the estimated location was accurate (average error of 5 meters in areas with a good coverage of access points). This document describes a survey on the state-of-the-art in this area, a preliminary study performed to analyse the user’s needs, the proposed architecture, the system implementation details, the experiments performed with the system and the conclusions obtained from this dissertation.

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