Technology Context

Whereas some application domains show a certain consensus on the role of system factors, human factors, and context factors, QoE management of multimedia systems and services is still faced with the challenge of identifying the key QoE influence factors. In this chapter, we focus on the potential of enhancing QoE management mechanisms by exploiting valuable context information. To get a good grip on the basics we first discuss a general framework for context monitoring and define context information, including technical, usage, social, economic, temporal, and physical factors. We then iterate the opportunities and challenges in involving context in QoE monitoring solutions, as context may be, e.g., hard to ascertain or very situational.

Lifestyle management is a growing area aimed at giving individuals support for an increased self-awareness; selfmonitoring technologies are essential in providing an objective account of our daily events. However, most self-monitoring technological solutions largely focus on physical health and ignore other aspects, such as mental or social. Our goal is to utilise context aware technologies in order to support people in understanding how various aspects of their lives influence their wellbeing, including, for example, mental and social health. For that, we need to gain a deeper insight into the challenges of designing such solutions, from sensing to interaction paradigms to user acceptance. This paper describes our proof-of-concept system design and implementation, including several novel information presentation choices, as well as results from our exploratory user-based evaluations.1