SenSay, a 'Context-Aware' Cell Phone.

According to this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers are developing a new cell phone technology which is aware of the user's activities and can react to it.

This new mobile phone technology, called "SenSay" for Sensing and Saying, was developed this spring by 16 graduate and undergraduate engineering and computer science students in a course led by Dan Siewiorek, director of the university's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and Asim Smailagic, who is a senior researcher at the university's Institute for Complex Systems.

The technology has not yet been packaged into a single unit; tests have used a personal digital assistant, or PDA, with a phone attachment linked to either a sensor box worn on a belt or a sensor armband.

Here is an image showing the current status of the Sensay system: a sensor box mounted on the hip (left), the mobile phone (center), and the voice and ambient microphones mounted on the user (right) (Credit: Univ. of Texas at Dallas)

Of course, the future Sensay phones will have more sensors than regular ones.

The SenSay system uses four primary sensors: a microphone to pick up the user's voice, another to monitor noise around the user, a light sensor and an accelerometer.

The microphones provide hints about whether the user is involved in a conversation or is in a quiet or noisy environment, while the light sensor can help determine whether the phone is being carried in a dark pocket. The accelerometer can be used to determine if the user is walking, running or sitting still.

Will this technology lead to more polite users? Certainly.

The researchers are interested in sensing four different states: busy and not to be interrupted, physically active, idle and "normal." Though the sensors can't always distinguish between them -- sitting at a computer terminal produces about the same sensor data as sitting on a bus -- most people change states between six and 12 times daily, a relatively low number, Siewiorek said.

If the phone senses that the user is busy -- say, involved in a conversation -- it might block an incoming call. The phone would send back a text message informing the caller that the user is busy, but advising that if the matter is urgent, the caller could try again within three minutes. If a call came from the same caller within that time frame, he noted, the phone would put the call through.

Even if the technology is not widely known yet, it has some big backers.

Sensing when to interrupt a user, one of the key technologies for SenSay, is also one of the capabilities being developed for Reflective Agents with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning, or RADAR, a $7 million project Carnegie Mellon is leading for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

If you're interested in this technology, you'll find additional images, diagrams and references in this research paper (PDF format, 1,156 KB, 10 pages).

Source: Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 2, 2003

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