Project

QuieSense: Distributed context-awareness system for Wi-Fi enabled mobile devices

Object-Based Media group

What if our mobile devices could sense and then adapt to the spatial, temporal, and social context of their local environments? Imagine if your smartphone was smart enough to know that it should not be ringing loudly when you are in an important meeting, or that it should not be in silent mode when you are trying to find where you have misplaced it at home. We have created an inexpensive secure system that delivers this goal by embedding contextual information into the environment rather than the phone. In that way, all mobile devices at a given location can detect the broadcasted contextual information using Wi-Fi and change their behavior accordingly, without requiring any handshake or internet connection. By leveraging the latest and most inexpensive Wi-Fi modules on the market, and by building our own embedded firmware, server-side software, and mobile app, we are able to deploy this system in a secure and massively scalable way.