VTT TECHNICAL RESEARCH CENTRE OF FINLANDwww.vtt.fi

RoutineMaker Towards End-User Automation of Daily Routines Using Smartphones

Smartphones are becoming ubiquitous and ever more important for the daily activities of their users. The multitude of smartphone applications are used almost everywhere at any time, so that some of them have become daily routines.

Examples of routine-like behaviour can include checking e-mail in the morning, reading the news or listening to music while commuting, navigating or checking-in to places to assess and comment our on-the-go experiences. People also use smartphones to complement other daily activities or routines, such as watching TV or going to the grocery store.

Ville Antila, Jussi Polet, Arttu Lämsä, Jussi Liikka Context-Awareness and Service Interaction VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

Oulu, Finland {ville.antila, jussi.polet, arttu.lamsa, jussi.liikka}@vtt.fi

What we did

• We developed an application to detect the day-to-day smartphone use by logging the applications’ usage and locations.

• We developed an algorithm to process and analyse the logged usage data into identifi able patterns.

• We developed a smartphone application with a functionality to create automated “tasks” out of the identifi ed patterns.

• We conducted a two-week user study to analyse the approach and to receive user feedback.

Routine detection

The algorithm is split into two main phases, geographical and application clustering:

• Geographical clustering discovers the most signifi cant locations from the data (visited or stayed most often).

• After the geographical clustering is done, an application matrix is generated inside each geographical cluster and fi ltered time wise in order to get the applications’ usage times.

Prototype system

The prototype consists of:

• A mobile application (for Android 2.2 and onwards devices), which collects usage data (locations and applications used), sends it to the server and presents the processed usage data to the user, visualized as locations on a map. If the user notices helpful or useful routines from the data, an automated routine can be created out of it.

• A back-end service, which performs the data storage, processing and provides the processed data for the client(s).