CaCM: Context-Aware Call Management for Mobile Phones

When a user receives a phone call, his mobile phone will normally ring or vibrate immediately regardless of whether the user is available to answer the call or not, which could be disruptive to his ongoing tasks or social situation. Mobile call management systems are a type of mobile applications for coping with the problem of mobile interruption. They aim to reduce mobile interruption through effective management of incoming phone calls and improve user satisfaction. Many existing systems often utilize only one or two types of user context (e.g., location) to determine the availability of the callee and make real-time decisions on how to handle the incoming call. In reality, however, mobile call management needs to take diverse contextual information of individual users into consideration, such as time, location, event, and social relations. The objective of this research is to propose a conceptual framework called CaCM (Context-aware Call Management) for mobile call management and implement a prototype system based on CaCM that incorporates rich context factors, including time, location, event, social relations, environment, body position, and body movement, and leverages machine learning algorithms to build call management models for individual mobile phone users. An empirical evaluation via a field study shows promising results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.