Combining User Profiles and Situation Contexts for Spontaneous Service Provision in Smart Assistive Environments

Wireless hotspots are permeating our workplace, home and public places bringing interesting services and spontaneous connectivity to mobile users. Since mobile users will be immersed in thousands of different kinds of pervasive services, it’s of paramount importance to provide appropriate services to the right person in the right form. Existing approaches offer a rather simplistic solution to the problem and seldom consider the multi-dimensional contextual information. In this paper we present a service provision mechanism which can enable effective service provision based on semantic similarity measure with the combination of user profiles and situation context in WLAN enabled environment. We illustrate our ideas through a scenario of service discovery and provision in public places (e.g. shopping mall) where a disabled person can select appropriate services with the constraints of his mobile device.