Activity-based Context Awareness Model And Context Awareness Interaction Design

Context awareness system can provide people proactive, adaptive and personalized services. However, there is still a big gap between people’s expectations towards context awareness system and its actions, which impact people’s trust, acceptance and user experience. The main reasons come from the design and realization of context awareness system is dominated by technology development, short of the understanding and knowledge on users’context awareness mechanism. Therefore, a method or model is needed to describe users’context awareness mechanism to guide the interaction design of context awareness systems.Based on the research on the previous context awareness systems, taking Activity Theory and situational awareness related theories as guidance, an activity-based context awareness model is proposed. Activity Theory is the basic framework to understand and analyze human activities, which describes human beings’activities, actions and operations with levels. It also defines and describes a complete activity system consists of subject, object, tool, community, rules and divisions. Theories on situational awareness try to understand and describe the whole process for people to make decisions in specific situations, mainly include the perceptions, interpretations and predictions about contexts in different cognitive stages. On the basis of comprehensive Activity Theory and situational awareness theories related research, the author proposed an activity-based context awareness model based on activities to describe human beings context awareness mechanism in specific activities.Activity-based context awareness model includes the descriptions on activity structures and human beings’context awareness process. Activity is determined by motivations and can be divided into different action stages. Each action stage has its specific goal consists of different operations. Subject, object, tool and environment are components of a specific activity. Context factors are different in different action stages. These active context factors correspond to firing rules. Human beings’ context awareness actions are triggered when certain rules are met. In order to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the activity-based context awareness model, the author selects shopping activities as the research round, and conducts a series of research on the interaction design and development process of context awareness shopping assistant. First, the effectiveness of activity-based context awareness model needs to be validated. By field observation in supermarkets and interviews on shopping activities, we describe in details the structure of shopping activities, the context factors influencing shopping activities, and possible help people can provide for shopping activities. In this way, the context awareness process of people in shopping can be understood, and the activity-based context awareness model is initially validated. Second, based on the activity-based context awareness model, the concept of activity-based context awareness shopping assistant is proposed, and a comparison study is carried out among context awareness shopping assistants based on activities and current context awareness shopping assistants. Users’perceptions and attitudes towards different context awareness mechanisms are measured by semantic differential scale. Generally speaking, activity-based context awareness shopping assistant cannot achieve the level of human beings’situational awareness, however, it can bring users better experience than the current context awareness systems. Therefore, the effectiveness of activity-based context awareness model has been further validated.Activity-based context awareness model describes human beings’context awareness mechanism to a certain extent. It can be used to guide the interaction design of context awareness system. The process of traditional interaction design mainly includes background analysis, user requirements analysis, design project proposal, system development and evaluations. Activity-based context awareness model provides the structure of data gathering, analysis and design for the context awareness system interaction design process, and provides guidance and help for context awareness system interaction designers, making the context awareness system interaction design process more structuralized.Activity-based context awareness model can describe general context awareness mechanism, and guide the design and development of context awareness system. However, there are still some limitations in this research. The author only analyzes shopping activities. Activity-based context awareness model need to be evaluated and improved through the analysis of more activities. Based on this model, the technology implement of context awareness system and the evaluation system of context awareness interaction design should be developed in the future.