What's in the apps for context?: extending a sensor for studying app usage to informing context-awareness

Abstract

Mobile phones became multi-purpose devices supporting their users with large variety of applications for various tasks. Not only the number of available applications is increasing, also the number of applications people are using on their devices is growing, as well as the amount of time people spent on their smartphones daily is getting bigger. In this workshop paper, we briefly describe our past work on understanding mobile application usage. We explain our research tool for measuring mobile application usage, called AppSensor, and discuss possibilities to exploit the information of mobile application usage to inform the reasoning about users' contexts. We contribute our source code to the workshop for a discussion and prototyping of use cases leveraging the information of which application a user is currently using.