Context-aware recommendations through context and activity recognition in a mobile environment

A framework to detect the current context and activity of the user by analyzing data retrieved from different sensors available on mobile devices is described and a recommender system is built to provide users a personalized content offer, consisting of relevant information based on the user’s current context.

Abstract

The mobile Internet introduces new opportunities to gain insight in the user's environment, behavior, and activity. This contextual information can be used as an additional information source to improve traditional recommendation algorithms. This paper describes a framework to detect the current context and activity of the user by analyzing data retrieved from different sensors available on mobile devices. The framework can easily be extended to detect custom activities and is built in a generic way to ensure easy integration with other applications. On top of this framework, a recommender system is built to provide users a personalized content offer, consisting of relevant information such as points-of-interest, train schedules, and touristic info, based on the user's current context. An evaluation of the recommender system and the underlying context recognition framework shows that power consumption and data traffic is still within an acceptable range. Users who tested the recommender system via the mobile application confirmed the usability and liked to use it. The recommendations are assessed as effective and help them to discover new places and interesting information.