Adding Some Smartness to Devices and Everyday Things

In mobile computing, context-awareness indicates the ability of a system to obtain and use information on aspects of the system environment. To implement context-awareness, mobile system components have to be augmented with the ability to capture aspects of their environment. Recent work has mostly considered location-awareness, and hence augmentation of mobile artifacts with locality. We discuss augmentation of mobile artifacts with diverse sets of sensors and perception techniques for awareness of context beyond location. We report experience from two projects, one on augmentation of mobile phones with awareness technologies, and the other on embedding of awareness technology in everyday non-digital artifacts