Context

To interact naturally with the user, products must be aware of their current context. We consider two facets of context awareness: Acquiring context and reacting to context. An example of a context aware product is a coffee machine that turns off the heating plate, if a temperature above a critical threshold is reported by an internal temperature sensor. In order to enable such context-aware behaviour, the context needs to be sensed from the environment. However, the sensors integrated into a product are usually rather limited. For that reason, the products should be able to exchange context information among each other. Further, the rules for specifying context-aware behaviour are usually not based on the pure sensor data but on higher level context. These two functionalities (distribution and inference) are provided by the Context Manager component in the SmartProducts platform.

The SmartProducts platform supports connecting sensors and actuators Sensor and Actuator Adapter to smart products as well as processing and distributing this gathered context information Context Manager.

     Components

• ContextManager: Generates higher-level context from the data provided by local sensors and context data provided by other smart products. In turn, the Context Manager can provide context data to other smart products.

• SensorAndActuatorAdapter: Sensors sense some physical properties of their environment and transform this physical information into digital form to be consumed by smart products. Actuators can change some predefined properties in their environment when a smart product commands them to do so. For example, the speed of a rotating fan can be increased or decreased, or lights can be switched on or off with the help of actuators.