Authors: Chris Harrison and Scott E. Hudson
Comments: Ross
Summary:
This paper talked about a sensor that could be placed on a mobile device in order to tell where it has been placed. Not only can mobile devices detect where in the world it is, the sensor could help decide where it was placed (i.e. in your hand, in a pocket or purse, or placed on a desk). This could help with a cell phone by helping the battery live longer by detecting when the screen really needs to be on. If the cell phone is in a pocket or purse then there is no reason for the screen to be showing what time of the day it is. If it is set on a desk there could be a need for that clock to be showing. The sensor could also have the capability to tell if it should use a ringer, or if the phone should do a vibration alert. When a phone is placed on a desk and it knows it is at a workplace then it could vibrate to alert the owner that someone is calling or sending a text message. If the phone is deep in a purse or in a pocket and is not at a work place then it could do an audible noise in order for the owner to realize someone is calling. In order to identify where the mobile device is located the sensor uses different color LED elements to accurately measure the reflective properties of certain materials. The pictures below show the sensor and the amount of light certain materials give off.
In order to identify materials they used a naive Bayes classifier which was trained on five different trials to evaluate the classification accuracy. The experiment to see how accurate this sensor was was tested on twenty seven sample materials twice a day for three days. Each time something was detected points would be recorded and at the end the naive Bayes classifier was trained in order to figure out the total accuracy. There were sixteen participants that were recruited through an email for this experiment and they were asked to fill out a questionnaire about where they usually place their mobile devices. They started to gather information from the participants at their homes and work places and their end results are shown in the picture below.
They had an overall accuracy of 94.4% with detecting of placement with an average of 4.3 placements out of an average of 5.5 total placements.
Discussion:
I think this would be very useful to have because there are many cell phones out their that eat battery power because they unnecessarily display things on the screen when it would be best to have the screen stay completely off. I think this could help with saving battery life and could be useful to have yourself automatically turn to vibrate or silent when you walk into work or some place where your phone is not supposed to be on. I think future work could be to implement the phone switching modes for whenever you are in a classroom and your phone is not supposed to be on. Many people keep their phones in their backpacks or pockets when in class, and the way this sensor would be implemented their phone would actually being ringing instead of vibrating whenever they get an incoming call or text message. It would be more beneficial to some people to have it turn itself to vibrate when in class, and change back to a ringer whenever they step outside of the classroom.
This is a really cool idea. You could probably extend it to other applications for dynamically changing what information you see or the user interface. The iPhone actually does some of that. The screen will automatically lock and go black whenever you put it to your ear during a call, and the calculator app will go from a simple calculator to a scientific whenever you rotate the phone.
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