context awareness via a single device-attached accelerometer during mobile computing
Interest in context-aware computing has expanded the use of sensing technologies. The accelerometer is one of the most widely used sensors for capturing context because it is small, inexpensive, lightweight, and self-operable. In efforts to obtain behavioral patterns, many studies have reported the use of multiple accelerometers attached to the human body. However, this is difficult to implement in real-life situations and may not fully address the context of user interaction. In contrast, the present study employed a single tri-axial accelerometer attached to a handheld computing device instead of to a user. The objective was to determine what contextual information could be obtained from this more feasible, albeit limited, source of acceleration data. Data analyses confirmed that changes in both mobility and lighting conditions induced statistically significant differences in the output of the accelerometer.
accelerometer mobile computing context-awareness sitting walking pen-based handheld device gait treadmill