The AWARE architecture

Maintaining social awareness of the working context of fellow co-workers is crucial to successful cooperation. For mobile, non co-located workers, however, this social awareness is hard to maintain. In this paper we present the concept of Context-Mediated Social Awareness to denote how context-aware computing can be used to facilitate social awareness. We illustrate the concept in a case study of mobile collaboration in a hospital and present the `AwarePhone', which is designed to support context-mediated social awareness among hospital clinicians. Based on this conceptual and empirical basis, the paper presents the AWARE architecture, which is a generic platform for supporting context-mediated social awareness.