Its 40 degrees outside. You are in your living room. Your air-conditioner has given up and your "phone" knows it. It also knows that your favourite flavour is strawberry and your preferred brand is Baskin Robbins. Pulling out all its contacts and coordinates, after checking with your nutritionist online, it discreetly places a call to the nearest outlet. Ten minutes later, the front doorbell rings, and there is your ice-cream. When you least expected it, but most wanted it.
That's Context Aware Computing and so is a tablet switching screen orientation or Amazon offering a recommendation.
And while Content has been, and continues to be king, Context could well take the queen's position. And could well be the most important player on the board, her power and influence dictating all else.
Context Aware Computing, Sentient Computing, Cognitive Computing; call it by any name, the trends that are emerging in this area are definitely worth keeping an eye on. Healthcare, a regular leader in the adoption of new technologies, is already seeing a lot of innovation in this area. But, having said all that, determining human context is not an easy matter, despite all the developments on data and devices.
Journalist Bruno de Latour coined the term Domotic in 1984. Domotic has been recently introduced in vocabulary as a composite word of Latin word Domus and Informatics, and it refers to intelligent houses, meaning the use of the automation technologies and computer science applied to the home.
It's not just about sensors talking to one another using geo-location and data analytics real-time. It's about having an eco-system that can adapt to the changing needs, and minds, of the customer. It's about creating the right technology infrastructure for life to flow, seamless and uninterrupted to the context.
What is the context?
It depends.