Accurate mobile context detection at low sensor cost

摘要

A mobile device includes a plurality of sensors, each with one or more costs associated with it. In order to reduce the cost associated with using the sensors to infer information about the device's current context, a sensor manager first collects readings from relatively low-cost sensors, and attempts to infer the device's context based on these readings. If the context cannot be unambiguously determined (within an acceptable degree of tolerance) using the low-cost sensor readings, the sensor manager activates one or more higher-cost sensors to identify the current context. In some instances, if the higher-cost sensor is still not adequate to determine the context, one or more even higher-cost sensors are activated. The weighting of the various costs associated with the sensors can be adjusted based on previous and/or predicted contexts.

主权项

1. A method for determining a venue of a mobile device, the method comprising:
obtaining a physical sensor reading collected by a physical sensor of a mobile device, the physical sensor reading quantifying a physical property of an environment around the mobile device, the physical sensor including at least one of: a camera, a microphone, a thermometer, and a barometer; identifying a candidate venue at which the mobile device may be located without obtaining a location reading collected by a location sensor of the mobile device, the candidate venue having a stationary location, wherein identifying the candidate venue comprises identifying the candidate venue based on a routine model predicting venues for the mobile device based on a current time; retrieving, from a fingerprint database, a sensor fingerprint comprising an average physical sensor reading at the candidate venue; comparing the physical sensor reading to the average physical sensor reading of the retrieved sensor fingerprint; determining a location of the mobile device from the candidate venue responsive to the comparison indicating that the physical sensor reading is within a threshold amount of the average physical sensor reading; and providing the determined location of the mobile device to a location-aware application of the mobile device.