Context-awareness and Multimodality

User interfaces must adapt to the growing dissemination of computing power in our everyday environment. Computing devices and applications are now used beyond the desktop. Mobile, wearable, and pervasive computing allow users to integrate computing in the flow of their activities in the physical world. But most of our systems are still deaf and blind to anything that isn’t explicitly input by the user. By taking the environmental interaction context into account, context-awareness promises easier interaction and new possibilities for applications. On the surface, there are many similarities between the needs of multimodal and context-aware applications. What can we learn from multimodality to build context-aware systems ? What are the common research problems ? To investigate these issues, we give a brief overview of context-aware systems, including a simple classification. We describe some abstractions we have found useful to help build context-aware applications. We then turn to the main problems facing the developers of context-aware systems and relate them to issues encountered in multimodal systems development.