Inferring Smartphone Positions based on Collecting the Environment’s Response to Vibration Motor Actuation
Key: DRCR15-1
Author: Irina Diaconita, Andreas Reinhardt, Delphine Christin, Christoph Rensing
Date: November 2015
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: ACM
Book title: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM) Symposium on QoS and Security for Wireless and Mobile Networks (Q2SWinet)
Keywords: context detection; phone position classification; active probing; vibration motor actuation
Abstract: Smartphones have become ubiquitous in recent years and otfer many useful services to their users, such as notifications about incoming calls and messages, or news updates in real-time. These notifications however do not consider the current user's and phone's context. As a result, they can disturb users in important meetings or remain unnoticed in noisy environment. In this paper, we therefore propose an approach to infer the phone's context based on its vibration motor. To this end, we trigger the phone's vibration motor for short time periods and measure the response of its environments using the built-in microphone and/or accelerometers. Our evaluation shows that leveraging accelerometers allows to recognize the current phone's context with an accuracy of more than 99%. As a result, our proposed solution outperforms our previous work based on played and recorded ringtones in terms of classification performance, user annoyance, as well as potential privacy threats.
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