Estimating Contextual Situations Using Indicators from Smartphone Sensor Values

Current context-aware applications often use the location of a user as the only indication of the current situation. These existing applications are therefore limited in their situation awareness, because of the poor indoor resolution of the location sensor and its high resource consumption. In response to these limitations we present an approach to estimate the contextual situation of a user without using resource inefficient location sensors. Our proposed solution utilizes a wide range of low powered sensors, together with two modified machine learning techniques to estimate the situation in a more resource efficient manner. Simulations and a proof-of-concept application show that the situation of a user can be determined within 50 ms at an accuracy above 90%, when only using the low energy sensors available on a smart phone and its limited processing power.