cODA: An Open-Source Framework to Easily Design Context-Aware Android Apps

Abstract

Mobile devices take an important part in everyday life. They are now cheaper and widespread, but still a lot of time is spent by the users to configure them: users adapt to their own device, not vice versa. Can our smart phones do something smarter? In this work, we propose a framework to support the development of context aware applications for Android devices: the goal of such applications is to reduce as much as possible the interaction with the user, making use of automatic and intelligent components. Moreover, these components should consume as less power and computational resources as possible, being them part of a mobile ecosystem whose battery and hardware are highly constrained. The work implies the study of a methodology that fits the Android framework and the design of a highly extensible software architecture. An open source framework based on the proposed methodology is then described. Some use cases are finally presented, analyzing the performances and the limitations of the proposed methodology.