This research has shown that a context-aware model can be developed to support the context awareness needs of mobile applications. The implementation of the proposed model can be used to support context awareness in mobile applications and enable mobile applications to take advantage of this valuable information. Context-aware mobile applications could assist in time-critical situations, such as emergency healthcare and location-based services as identified in Section 1.1 in Chapter 1.
The main research objective of this research was to develop a context-aware model for mobile applications using multiple input sources. A discussion of how this research achieved this objective is highlighted in this section. In order to achieve the main objective, several sub-objectives were identified in Section 1.4.2 in Chapter 1, which are shown below:
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RO 1. To identify the existing problems and requirements with context awareness in mobile applications (Chapter 2).
RO 2. To identify the existing problems with context awareness solutions that relate to mobile applications (Chapter 3)
RO 3. To develop a context-aware model using multiple input techniques and implement this model into a prototype (Chapter 4).
RO 4. To evaluate the utility, quality and efficacy of the prototype developed based on the proposed model (Chapter 5).
The Relevance Cycle of DSR initiated this research allowing for opportunities and problems to be identified. The problem identified for this research was that mobile applications do not use multiple data inputs to accurately determine context and therefore lack context awareness. This problem is in line with the problem relevance guideline highlighted in Section 1.4.3, as this problem can be applicable to mobile applications created by businesses.
Once the main problem of this research was identified, the Rigor Cycle of DSR allowed for consideration of past knowledge in the form of grounding theories and methods along with domain experience and expertise. The Relevance and Rigor Cycle allowed for Research Objectives 1 and 2 (RO 1 and RO 2) to be addressed by conducting literature studies on the two knowledge bases of this research, namely context awareness and mobile computing. These two literature studies were addressed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, which addressed the sub-objectives RO 1 and RO 2. Chapter 2 highlighted the requirements involved when dealing with context awareness as well as the existing issues with context recognition. Chapter 3 discussed context awareness in terms of mobile device, medical health (m-health) as a potential problem domain and problems with existing models that deal with context awareness. Chapter 2 achieved RO 1 by helping to identify requirements that would not only be used to design the proposed model but to also match these requirements to the existing context models identified in Chapter 3. This matching of the findings from Chapter 2 with the findings of Chapter 3 allowed for RO 2 to be achieved as an existing model, which was considered the most complete was used as a basis for the proposed model.
The requirements from successfully achieving RO 1 and the selected existing model as a basis from successfully achieving RO 2 allowed for the third research objective (RO 3) to be addressed. RO 3 was addressed in Chapter 4, which used the deliverables of both RO 1 and
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RO 2 to design the proposed model and implement the CoPro prototype based on this model. Chapter 4 embodied the central Design Cycle of DSR, which supported the building and evaluating of the design artefacts. The Design Cycle allowed for an iterative process to be followed in which generated feedback was used to further refine the design of the artefact. After several iterations, the designed model and implemented prototype, CoPro was ready to be evaluated achieving RO 3. Although this build and evaluate process was followed during the initial design of the context-aware model and initial implementation of CoPro, this process is meant to be used more formally in the evaluation of the design artefact. This notion is supported by a characteristic of DSR whereby re-evaluations are conducted to refine the design artefact until a final design artefact is produced. Therefore, the build and evaluate process was also followed during the DSR evaluation phase through performing several evaluation experiments that addressed the fourth and final research objective (RO 4).
To achieve the fourth research objective (RO 4), a total of four experiments were conducted in four evaluation scenarios highlighted in Section 5.5. These experiments evaluated the utility (effectiveness), quality (reliability) and efficacy (capability) of CoPro to determine if the main objective of this research was met. The results of these four experiments highlighted in Section 5.6, concluded that CoPro was indeed effective in producing, detecting and using context with preferences. These results in terms of quality of context also demonstrated the 88.13% of values in the fourth experiment had a reliability of above 50%. The results also highlighted that all the context values that were evaluated in terms of accuracy in both the third and fourth experiments 95.05% of them were determined as accurate using a statistical method. The final results of the repeated evaluation experiments successfully demonstrated the capability of CoPro in dealing with the limitations of the mobile computing platform including, limited battery power, limited processing power and missing information.
The results of all the experiments and particularly the fourth experiment validated that the design decisions made for producing the final prototype were correct as CoPro effectively supported the context awareness process that would be used in mobile applications. Therefore, the evaluation results demonstrated the achievement of all the sub-objectives and as a result, the main objective was achieved, which was to develop a context-aware model for mobile applications using multiple input sources.
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The requirements identified in Chapters 2 and 3 were also validated by the results of the evaluation of CoPro and the design of the proposed model. Design recommendations for future researchers interested in designing and implementing a context-aware model were also provided. These design recommendations form part of the contributions of this research and will be described in the next section.
This section has demonstrated the successful achievement of all the research objectives identified forth for this research. The contributions of this research are described in the next section in term of theoretical and practical contributions.