Title
Getting closer: an empirical investigation of the proximity of user to their smart phones
Abstract
Much research in ubiquitous computing assumes that a user's phone will be always on and at-hand, for collecting user context and for communicating with a user. Previous work with the previous generation of mobile phones has shown that such an assumption is false. Here, we investigate whether this assumption about users' proximity to their mobile phones holds for a new generation of mobile phones, smart phones. We conduct a data collection field study of 28 smart phone owners over a period of 4 weeks. We show that in fact this assumption is still false, with the within arm's reach proximity being true close to 50% of the time, similar to the earlier work. However, we also show that smart phone proximity within the same room (arm+room) as the user is true almost 90% of the time. We discuss the reasons for these phone proximities and the implications of this on the development of mobile phone applications, particularly those that collect user and environmental context, and delivering notification to users. We also show that we can accurately predict the proximity at the arm level and arm+room level with 75 and 83% accuracy, respectively, with features simple to collect and model on a mobile phone. Further we show that for several individuals who are almost always within the arm+room level, we can predict this level with over 90% accuracy.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1145/2030112.2030135
UbiComp
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
phone proximity,room level,smart phone proximity,arm level,mobile phone,empirical investigation,user context,smart phone owner,smart phone,collect user,mobile phone application,ubiquitous computing,mobility,data collection,proximity,mobile device,field study,mobile devices
Conference
75
PageRank 
References 
Authors
4.41
12
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Anind Dey111484959.91
Katarzyna Wac240445.51
Denzil Ferreira376849.89
Kevin Tassini4865.60
Jin-Hyuk Hong579745.99
Julian Ramos619811.63