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A large number of blind people use smartphone-based assistive technology to perform their common activities. In order to provide a better user experience the existing user interface paradigm needs to be revisited. A new user interface model has been proposed in this paper. A simplified, semantically consistent, and blind-friendly adaptive user interface is provided. The proposed solution is evaluated through an empirical study on 63 blind people leveraging an improved user experience in performing common activities on a smartphone.

The integration of cheap and powerful sensors in smartphones has enabled the emergence of several context-aware applications and frameworks. However, the available smartphone context-aware frameworks are static because of using relational data models having predefined usage of sensory data. Importantly, the frameworks lack the soft integration of new data types and relationships that appear with the emergence of new smartphone sensors. Furthermore, sensors generate huge data that intensifies the problem of too much data and not enough knowledge. Smarting of smartphone sensory data is essential for advanced analytical processing, integration, inferencing, and interpretation by context-aware applications. In order to achieve this goal, novel smartphone sensors ontology is required for semantic modeling of smartphones and sensory data, which is the main contribution of this paper. This paper presents SmartOntoSensor, a lightweight mid-level ontology that has been developed using NeOn methodology and Content Ontology Design pattern. The ontology describes smartphone and sensors from different aspects including platforms, deployments, measurement capabilities and properties, observations, data fusion, and context modeling. SmartOntoSensor has been developed using Protégé and evaluated using OntoQA, SPARQL, and experimental study. The ontology is also tested by integrating into ModeChanger application that leverages SmartOntoSensor for automatic changing of smartphone modes according to the varying contexts. We have obtained promising results that advocate for the improved ontological design and applications of SmartOntoSensor.

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