Context Acquisition and Acting in Pervasive Physiological Applications

Physiological computing means using physiological sensors in computing. This is a natural and promising continuation of pervasive computing: as smart devices begin to permeate the environment, they can be used to collect information about the user’s emotional, cognitive and physical state to improve the context-awareness of applications. Creating pervasive physiological computing applications is hard, however. We propose a software framework that simplifies the creation of these applications by providing a first design as well as support for processing sensor data, distributing analysis results, and decision making under the uncertainty that arise in physiological computing. We illustrate the presented framework with the personalized affective music player, a context-aware physiological application that plays music to guide the mood of a user into a pre-defined direction.