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 low-cost sensor reading collected by a low-cost sensor of a mobile device, the low-cost sensor reading quantifying a physical property of an environment around the mobile device; identifying a candidate venue at which the mobile device may be located without obtaining a high-cost sensor reading collected by a high-cost sensor of the mobile device; retrieving, from a fingerprint database, a sensor fingerprint comprising a typical low-cost sensor reading from the low-cost sensor at the candidate venue; determining whether the low-cost sensor reading is sufficient to identify a venue of the mobile device by comparing the low-cost sensor reading to the typical low-cost sensor reading of the retrieved sensor fingerprint; determining a venue of the mobile device responsive to determining whether the low-cost sensor reading is sufficient; and providing the determined venue of the mobile device to a location-aware application of the mobile device.