Context awareness is a property of mobile devices which is complementary to location awareness. Location, as we know, may determine how some processes around a contributing device operate. Context, on the other hand, may be applied more flexibly with mobile users, especially with smart phones. We here look at some of its business use cases. Originating from ubiquitous computing, which sought to deal with linking changes in the environment with static computer systems, context computing is also applied to contextual application design and business process management issues.

What is context aware computing?

Context aware computing is mainly defined as a style of computing which uses situational and environmental information about people, places and things in order to anticipate immediate needs and proactively offer enriched, situation-aware and usable content, functions and experiences. It is expected that by the end of next year, more than half of the Fortune 500 companies will have context aware computing initiatives.

Challenges

Privacy is one of the biggest concerns. For example, in many cases, local authorities want to use location services to find out where their employees are. But unions balk at such deployments, suggesting that the supervisors do not need to know anything. Another challenge is the federation of information. In order to add context awareness, a system may need an ID from a user’s carrier, a meeting time from a smartphone calendar or information from a social media platform. But ownership of the information is a big issue. Last but not the least is the challenge of complexity. It will be interesting to see how such computing will be kept simple and in a way that is scalable, agile and quick.

Fretting out hidden supplies

Early context-aware mobility projects involved integration of location information into wireless applications. For example, Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare in Florida has been using location services for asset tracking since 2006. As of now, they have tagged about 2700 medical wireless devices and updated wireless infrastructure to track anywhere across a 800,000 square foot facility. Taking help from context aware computing, the hospital has taken its asset tracking initiative from being just satisfactory to being highly effective, enabling nurses to pinpoint supplies. They had some problems early on as they were using a first-generation wireless network which was not location aware. But as they made several adjustments and upgraded their wireless infrastructure, the results were exceptional.

Business advantages of context aware computing

Context awareness supports task-relevant information of services, making tasks more efficient and improving decision making through context-driven recommendations. Although it is not a very latest property, it still has the potential to drive businesses into new realms when it is clubbed with IoT and Big Data concepts.


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