Smartphones as Intelligent Sensors and Actuators: Processing and Computing Issues

Dear Colleagues,

Smartphones combine the functions of mobile phones and PDAs. With the introduction of modern operating systems (e.g., Android), smartphones are now considered versatile devices and offer a wide range of possible uses. The technological evolution of smartphones, and their increasing diffusion, give mobile network providers the opportunity to come up with more advanced and innovative services. Among these are the so-called context-aware services: highly customizable services tailored to the user’s preferences and needs, which rely on real-time knowledge of the user’s surroundings, without requiring complex configuration on the user’s part. Examples of context-aware services are user profile changes that result from context changes, user proximity-based advertising or media content tagging, etc.

In practice, smartphone applications can answer the following questions about the device’s surroundings: What, Who, Where, When, Why, and How. Consequently, in order to provide this information, a description of the smartphone’s environment must be obtained by acquiring and combining signals and data from different sources, both external (e.g., cell IDs, GPS coordinates, nearby WiFi and Bluetooth devices) and internal (e.g., idle/active status, battery power, accelerometer measurements, microphones, camera).

Starting from the sources and sensors available to smartphone terminals, and the possible information they can provide, it is possible to develop a set of services, such as Audio Environment Recognition, Speaker Count, Indoor and Outdoor Positioning, and User Activity Recognition with different applicative aims: security and safety, e-health, wellness, commercial advertisement, etc. On the other hand, a smartphone allows the sending of information to the user by exploiting the display, the camera flash, and the speaker. It can act as an actuator that can drive the user behavior.

In all the mentioned tasks, due to the limited computational capacity and energy autonomy of smartphones, the nature of the employed platform much be taken into account; solutions must carefully account for the computational load and the energy consumption required to realize specific functionalities, such as intelligent sensors and/or actuators.

All the aforementioned processing, computing, and energy saving issues represent very hot topics in current research within the field; this Special Issue will deal with such topics, but is not limited to such areas of study. The Special issue will cover signals and data processing, along with the following keywords.

Dr. Igor Bisio
Guest Editor

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• emerging trends of context awareness with Smartphones
• ambient information gathering and modeling
• context reasoning/extraction from large-scale data and signals
• smartphone sensing
• smartphone interfaces
• personal activity recognition
• emotion recognition
• personal awareness in environments with smartphones
• healthcare
• social information understanding
• enhancing social interaction among peers
• mobile social networks
• urban sensing
• intelligent transportation systems employing smartphones
• user mobility patterns
• android programming