Recognizing user location context for car navigation devices

Abstract

Many people use on-vehicle information devices on a daily basis. These devices have many useful functions for route guidance, audio services, and gathering traffic information. In addition, smartphones are being used as on-vehicle information devices because of the ubiquity of low-priced applications that can be used. Location context is one of the recognized contexts in our proposed system. The context shows the degree of driving experience with a specific location. Our proposed system requires driver's location context because the context plays an important role in correctly guessing which function is required by a user at any given time. Therefore, we are researching a method for recognizing location context. In the primary stage, we implemented a prototype system based on a simple hypothesis that the familiarity of roads for a user and the frequency of his/her travel are in relative proportion. In this paper, we present an improved method for recognizing the location context.