Context and Bio-Aware Applications for Android
Michael Mitchell
Florida State University

The dramatically expanding capabilities of the modern smart phone are enabling the creation of entirely new classes of applications for health, wellness, and entertainment.  Data collected from on-board sensors, web services, social media and external biosensors can be integrated to determine the context of the device, user, and environment. These combined contexts allow the device to achieve a new level of awareness of the user and surroundings, thereby enabling the creation of rich, biologically driven applications.

Collected and derived context is stored in a context provider - an extension of the Android content provider - offering a unified, query-able interface to all contextual data on the device.  This allows for rapid development of new context and bio-aware applications and helps simplify the deployment model. Presented bio-aware applications include: BEAT, a medical monitoring and alert framework, and TempoTrainer, a biofeedback driven music recommendation system.