Context Aware and Adaptive Mobile Audio

Abstract: Today a large percentage of the population uses a handheld (either a mobile phone or a PDA) a laptop computer, or some other computing device. As this penetration increases, the user wants to take as great an advantage of these devices as possible. It is for that reason that communication is demanded almost everywhere. Simply having continuous access to the network is no longer sufficient thus context awareness and easy accessibility are becoming more and more relevant. The idea of this masters thesis is to explore these ideas building on the prior work of Maria José Parajón Domínguez. The devices used for this study will be an HP iPAQ h5550 and a laptop. A client-server application, whose components will be explained in detail in further sections, was designed to study some factors that may be taken into account when trying to satisfy the users´ demands as stated above. One of these factors could be, for example, what are the effects of having a personal voice interface on the traffic to and from the user’s mobile device. The aim of this voice interface will be to provide more freedom to the user and also satisfy the demand for greater accessibility and facilitate mobile usage, not only for the common user, but also for handicapped people. Regarding the user’s desire to always have connectivity everywhere, we wish to examine the effects on the traffic to and from the user’s handheld, when exploiting significant local storage. Also related to the requirements on current devices to be always and everywhere connected and the huge amount of resources that this entails, it will be of interest to study the possibility of exchanging personalized CODECs (in the extreme case exchanging voice synthesis modules) and how this might affect traffic to and from the user’s mobile device. This last method could potentially greatly reducing both the demands on the communication links and the cost of this connectivity. With all these ideas in mind, this thesis aims to research an area that is nowadays continuously attracting new users and the goal is to find solutions to the demands that have resulted for these trends.