An extensible, self contained, layered approach to context acquisition

Smart phones show increasing capabilities for context-aware applications. The development of such applications involves implementation of mechanisms for context acquisition and context adaptation. To facilitate efficient use of the device's resources and avoid monitoring the same context changes from multiple points, it is necessary that applications share the context acquisition mechanism. In this paper, we intend to develop a generic context acquisition engine which is capable of context capturing, composition and broadcasting. By deploying the engine on a mobile device, context changes are monitored from single point and disseminated to various context aware applications running on the same device. As a proof of concept, the context acquisition engine has been implemented on the Android platform.