Hyunmi Park

Sensible appliances: applying context-awareness to appliance design

A sensible appliance is an appliance which understands a user’s situation and takes appropriate actions to provide a high-quality user experience. A sensible appliance should be able to collect and infer relevant contexts to understand the user’s situation. It is important for designers to understand context-awareness and its impact on design. In this paper, we introduce what context and context-awareness are by using data from our survey on existing work in the area. Then, we present our categorization of existing appliances based on their contextualness. Finally, as a design case study of context-aware appliances, we describe our work on the Gate Reminder—a ubiquitous and context-aware reminder appliance built into a front door to remind users of things they should take with them when leaving home, and messages they should be aware of before going out.