An Empirical Investigation of the Influence of Context Parameters on Everyday Planning Activities

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the study is to explore the context, from the users’ perspective, in order to find relevant context parameters that can be useful in the development of the future context-aware technology. The goal is to find some of the context parameters relevant to the situated activity and investigate to what extent and in which way they influence the user in everyday planning activities. The method used in the study was based on scenario descriptions. A total of 41 participants reported how they would have acted in the different situations and they also rated how important they believed the different context factors were in the situations. Analyses were made to reveal relationships between context factors and service properties used by the participants in the scenarios. In the study several interesting relationships between context factors and the use of services were discovered. The level of urgency was in several situations considered to be important, and it was also found to have an impact on how the participants chose to communicate. The cost was introduced by the participants during the study. It seemed to be important; however, in situations with high urgency it became less important. The study revealed a potential relationship between the risk of disturbing the people in the vicinity and the effort to communicate quietly. Another interesting finding was the relationship between privacy and the choice of modality when communicating: voice-based services were avoided. Further, the importance of privacy and disturbance also appeared to have greater influence in non-anonymous situations than in anonymous.