Place-Its: A Study of Location-Based Reminders on Mobile Phones

  • Timothy Sohn ,
  • Kevin A. Li ,
  • Gunny Lee ,
  • Ian Smith ,
  • ,
  • William G. Griswold

Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2005) |

Published by Springer Verlag

Context-awareness can improve the usefulness of automated reminders. However, context-aware reminder applications have yet to be evaluated throughout a person’s daily life. Mobile phones provide a potentially convenient and truly ubiquitous platform for the detection of personal context such as location, as well as the delivery of reminders. We designed Place-Its, a location-based reminder application that runs on mobile phones, to study people using location-aware reminders throughout their daily lives. We describe the design of Place-Its and a two-week exploratory user study. The study reveals that location-based reminders are useful, in large part because people use location in nuanced ways.