Bluetooth in Context acquisition

Abstract

PAN, Personal Area Network, may be described as the connection of personal devices, allowing information exchange over short ranges. This term is used on several of todays short range wireless technologies like Bluetooth, ZigBee, Infrared etc. In this thesis we look in to how Bluetooth as a PAN technology may be used to enrich context information to a person. Context is information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. It may be acquired in many ways, e.g. from user input (status in an IM client), sensed (temperature, location, heart rate), or derived (e.g. combination of location and time of day). Several scenarios showing the benefits of context aware computing will be presented, and proposals on how Bluetooth may fit in as an enabling technology will be evaluated. In the end, a design and implementation showing Bluetooth in context acquisition will be presented.