Context-Aware Push Notification Filtering for Mobile Energy Savings
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing solutions for managing push notifications on mobile devices either lead to energy consumption issues or fail to account for user context, resulting in irrelevant or intrusive notifications, and may cause users to miss important alerts.
Innovation Solution
A mobile communication device and remote notification service system that selectively receives push notifications based on user context, using a context module to determine which applications should receive notifications, and a notification module to communicate this selection to the service, which then only sends relevant notifications, reducing power consumption and maintaining user privacy.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If push notifications are sent to all applications, then users receive complete information, but energy consumption increases due to radio staying awake
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the relevant notifications from the complete set of push notifications. The notification module selectively receives and processes only those notifications that match current user context, filtering out irrelevant ones before they consume device resources. This resolves the contradiction by taking out only the necessary information while avoiding energy waste from processing all notifications.
Solution Approach 2:
Instead of processing all notifications equally, the system applies partial action by selectively handling only the subset of notifications relevant to current user context. The radio stays awake minimally, and the notification module processes only necessary notifications, avoiding excessive energy consumption while maintaining information completeness for relevant alerts.
2Use of energy by moving object
If push notifications are manually turned off to avoid unwanted notifications, then energy consumption decreases, but users may miss important notifications
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements dynamic notification filtering where the set of relevant notifications changes based on real-time user context. Unlike static manual filtering, the system adaptively adjusts which notifications are delivered based on current activities, location, and user state, ensuring important notifications are never missed while minimizing energy consumption by filtering out irrelevant ones.
Solution Approach 2:
The context module continuously monitors user state and provides feedback to the notification module, which adjusts notification delivery accordingly. This feedback loop ensures that the system learns user preferences and context patterns, maintaining high reliability for important notifications while optimizing energy consumption by suppressing irrelevant ones.
3Ease of operation
If push notifications are sent regardless of user context, then notification delivery is simple, but notifications may be intrusive or irrelevant to the user
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a context module as an intermediary between the notification system and the user. This intermediary layer analyzes user context and filters notifications before delivery, resolving the contradiction by maintaining simple notification delivery mechanisms while adding intelligent filtering to prevent intrusiveness and relevance issues.
4Use of energy by moving object
If notification selection is performed statically from user side, then device processing load is reduced, but selection does not account for user situation
Solution Approach 1:
The patent inverts the traditional approach by moving the selection logic from the device side to the network side. The notification module on the device simply receives pre-filtered notifications from the network, reversing where the filtering occurs. This maintains low device processing energy while enabling context-aware selection through server-side context analysis.
Data Source
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AI summary
An aspect of the disclosure relates to a mobile communication device (100) configured to notify pushed notifications from a remote notification service (130) to a user comprising a context module (112) for determining context information and a notification module (113) configured to request the notification service to only push select notifications that the user is interested in according to the context information.