Dynamic user-centric mobile context model

Context-aware systems can dynamically adapt to specific dynamic user situations to provide smarter mobile services. In general, context refers to the information that can be used to characterize these situations, and context models are employed to specify contextual information described in context-aware systems. However, even though user context is highly dynamic, existing context models either focus on modeling static views of context or lack appropriate design abstractions to deal with dynamic aspects and interactions involving contextual elements such location, time, user roles, social relationships, changing preferences and virtual environments. In this paper, we present a dynamic user-centric mobile context model that can be used to model the aspects of context-aware systems that are subject to frequent changes. We illustrate the applicability of our approach by describing a case study on mobile e-healthcare. Benefits of these models include avoiding the development of context-aware systems from scratch, enabling future use of model-driven approaches, and reducing implementation effort.