Towards Activity Context using Software Sensors

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel approach to sensing user activity by leveraging software sensors within service-oriented systems, aiming to enhance context-aware computing without relying solely on hardware sensors.

Contribution

It introduces a method for using software-based sensors to detect user activity, integrating context-awareness with service-oriented computing.

Findings

Software sensors can effectively sense user activity.

The approach leverages standard protocols for information exchange.

Potential for more flexible and useful context sensing.

Abstract

Service-Oriented Computing delivers the promise of configuring and reconfiguring software systems to address user's needs in a dynamic way. Context-aware computing promises to capture the user's needs and hence the requirements they have on systems. The marriage of both can deliver ad-hoc software solutions relevant to the user in the most current fashion. However, here it is a key to gather information on the users' activity (that is what they are doing). Traditionally any context sensing was conducted with hardware sensors. However, software can also play the same role and in some situations will be more useful to sense the activity of the user. Furthermore they can make use of the fact that Service-oriented systems exchange information through standard protocols. In this paper we discuss our proposed approach to sense the activity of the user making use of software.