An Event-Driven Workflow Framework to Develop Context-Aware Mobile Applications

This paper introduces IVO (Integrated Virtual Operator), a framework to build and deploy context-aware mobile applications using smartphones as the ubiquitous interaction device. The framework uses an event-driven workflow model to support the dynamic nature of context-aware applications, and is designed to enable non-programmers to create and run new mobile applications. An IVO application is described as a set of workflows triggered by events that are automatically generated in runtime by sensing the environment, either through the smartphone's own sensors, or using a sensor infrastructure external to the smartphone. This paper describes, in more detail, the Android client developed to validate the framework's usability and usefulness, and discusses the usability tests of an application developed with the framework.