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Sensible appliances: applying context-awareness to appliance design

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Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Samsung Electronics Co., 6th Floor, Apkujong Building, 599-4, Shinsa-dong, Kangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 135-893

    SungWoo Kim, SangHyun Park, JungBong Lee, YoungKyu Jin, Hyun-mi Park, Amy Chung, SeungEok Choi & WooSik Choi

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  1. SungWoo Kim
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  2. SangHyun Park
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  3. JungBong Lee
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  4. YoungKyu Jin
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  5. Hyun-mi Park
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Correspondence to SungWoo Kim.

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Kim, S., Park, S., Lee, J. et al. Sensible appliances: applying context-awareness to appliance design. Pers Ubiquit Comput 8, 184–191 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-004-0276-9

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