Implicit Interaction Approach for Car-related Tasks On Smartphone Applications

This work proposes an implicit interaction approach to ease implementing basic car-related tasks on a smartphone application. Many car drivers use apps on their smartphones to get support in typical tasks related to car usage, yet some of the available apps have a poor user experience because they require the user’s attention, causing a distraction while driving. In addition, they often rely on users inputting relevant data repetitively. Implicit interaction is a possible solution to improve the user experience of car-related interfaces. Basic user tasks for many car applications are (i) reporting parking the car in a specific position, (ii) declaring that the user will soon free a parking spot, and (iii) that a new trip with the car has begun (thus, that a parking spot became free). The proposed context-aware interaction approach to executing these tasks is described together with its implementation in an application that leverages the smartphone’s sensing capability of users’ locations and motion activities and merges them to infer parking and unparking events.