SMinder: detect a left-behind phone using sensor-based context awareness

Forget your smartphone in the car again? This happens often in our daily lives, sometimes even makes troubles. In this paper, we present SMinder, an effective, low power approach to remind user take the phone when getting off the car. Based on the context awareness techniques in mobile sensing, we detect the situation of forgetting to take the phone when getting off the car. SMinder requires neither any infrastructure nor any human intervention. It only uses low power smartphone sensors. Namely, the smartphone detects by itself whether it is left behind and remind the user before he leaves the car. SMinder reminds the user with high accuracy and minimum energy consumption, making it realistic for real-world use. Compared to the existing approaches, SMinder is cheaper and easier to use. Our experiments with the prototype system demonstrate the performance, scalability, and robustness of SMinder.