Towards a Formal Description of Context

An important aspect of wearable computing is the fact that users do not focus their attention exclusively on the wearable computer but are often occupied by other tasks. Therefore, implicit interaction is desirable because it avoids constant user attention. The information that is needed to support such interaction is usually called context information. To establish context, a wearable device needs to observe the user and its environment through sensors to afterwards interpret this information to enable implicit interaction. Current research on context is pointing in many directions. The Context Toolkit[1] aimed to be a reusable solution to handle context in a distributed infrastructure. In [2], Gellersen et al. presented several prototypes that use data from multisensors instead of a simple sensor. Others use context for building intelligent user interfaces like Bolt’s Pioneer work in [3]. Because of the different notions of context and the obvious lack of an precise definition, this paper is an attempt to define context in a more formal way.