SenSay: a context-aware mobile phone

SenSay is a context-aware mobile phone that adapts to dynamically changing environmental and physiological states. In addition to manipulating ringer volume, vibration, and phone alerts, SenSay can provide remote callers with the ability to communicate the urgency of their calls, make call suggestions to users when they are idle, and provide the caller with feedback on the current status of the Sensay user. A number of sensors including accelerometers, light, and microphones are mounted at various points on the body to provide data about the user’s context. A decision module uses a set of rules to analyze the sensor data and manage a state machine composed of uninterruptible, idle, active and normal states. Results from our threshold analyses show a clear delineation can be made among several user states by examining sensor data trends. SenSay augments its contextual knowledge by tapping into applications such as electronic calendars, address books, and task lists. The phone alleviates cognitive load on users by various methods including detecting when the user is uninterruptible and automatically turning the ringer off. 1.