Exploiting User Models and Context-Awareness to Support Personal Daily Activities

A context -aware system can adapt its behaviour according to the user’s personal or environmental context. Historically, user models have been used to enable the adaptation and personalisation of services or information delivered to users. However, despite the apparent correlation between the two approaches, the utilisation of user modelling techniques within the domain of context -aware computing is a relatively unexploited research area. In this paper, we explore the relationship between context -awareness and user modelling, through the design of a context -aware personal assistant, which we call our Personal Digital Secretary (PDS). The requirements for this application make demands on both user modelling and context -aware techniques. In order to investigate these requirements and facilitate the design of the PDS, a number of scenarios are considered. Finally, several issues for engineering our PDS are investigated and discussed.