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Byron Spice

September 02, 2003

Sep. 2--Carnegie Mellon University researchers are developing cell phones that display more manners than some of the people who use them:

Phones that don't interrupt while you're talking to someone.

Phones that remind you of the best time to return an important call.

Phones that remember to ring if they're sitting on desktops and vibrate if they're inside pants' pockets; that ring loudly if you're in a noisy garage, but softly if you're in a doctor's waiting room.

So far, the "context-aware" cell phones can't distinguish when the user is in a theater audience -- though they would have the sense to shut themselves off if they could. Dan Siewiorek, director of the university's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, says he and his fellow researchers may still figure out a way to do that.

This new mobile phone technology, called "SenSay" for Sensing and Saying, was developed this spring by 16 graduate and undergraduate engineering and computer science students in a course led by Siewiorek and Asim Smailagic, who is a senior researcher at the university's Institute for Complex Systems.

The technology has not yet been packaged into a single unit; tests have used a personal digital assistant, or PDA, with a phone attachment linked to either a sensor box worn on a belt or a sensor armband. But Siewiorek hopes to build a couple dozen self-contained SenSay phones for testing as part of a larger Pentagon-sponsored project to develop a software "secretary."

Making a cell phone aware of where the user is and what the user is doing "is a natural evolution," Siewiorek said. Cell phones already have some useful sensors -- a microphone and, in some cases, a light sensor -- so it's reasonable to ask whether adding a few more might make the devices more aware of their environment and thus more useful.

The SenSay system uses four primary sensors: a microphone to pick up the user's voice, another to monitor noise around the user, a light sensor and an accelerometer.

The microphones provide hints about whether the user is involved in a conversation or is in a quiet or noisy environment, while the light sensor can help determine whether the phone is being carried in a dark pocket. The accelerometer can be used to determine if the user is walking, running or sitting still.

Experiments also have been conducted with SenseWear, a wireless armband produced by BodyMedia for monitoring physiological conditions such as temperature, movement and galvanic skin response.

The researchers are interested in sensing four different states: busy and not to be interrupted, physically active, idle and "normal." Though the sensors can't always distinguish between them -- sitting at a computer terminal produces about the same sensor data as sitting on a bus -- most people change states between six and 12 times daily, a relatively low number, Siewiorek said.

If the phone senses that the user is busy -- say, involved in a conversation -- it might block an incoming call. The phone would send back a text message informing the caller that the user is busy, but advising that if the matter is urgent, the caller could try again within three minutes. If a call came from the same caller within that time frame, he noted, the phone would put the call through.

In another situation, the phone might help two parties connect. For instance, if the user needed to return a call and the phone sensed that the user was idle, it might "ping" the number of the other person. If the other phone confirmed that its user was idle, the first phone then might prompt its user to return the call then.

The phone can't yet sense whether the user is in a theater watching a movie or a play; the signals it receives aren't much different than those it would get if the user was watching TV in her living room. But it may someday be able to make such judgments if it can tap into the location-sensing technology of the cell phone network, Siewiorek said.

The initial work was funded by a National Science Foundation grant and seed money from the Semiconductor Research Corp.

Sensing when to interrupt a user, one of the key technologies for SenSay, is also one of the capabilities being developed for Reflective Agents with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning, or RADAR, a $7 million project Carnegie Mellon is leading for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. RADAR would be a "personalized cognitive assistant," a computerized secretary of sorts, that would help juggle phone calls, sort through e-mail messages, and make meeting and travel plans for its users.

Siewiorek, who also is one of the principal investigators for RADAR, said he hopes to provide that project's researchers with a couple dozen of the context-aware phones to see how they might fit into the larger system.

Though Carnegie Mellon has had some initial discussions with Intel, Siewiorek said the SenSay technology has not yet been widely publicized. Smailagic unveiled the technology this summer at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London and the first research paper on the subject is set for publication this October.

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