Real World User Model: Evolution of User Modeling Triggered by Advances in Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing

Over the last few years, user modeling scenery is changing. With the recent advancements in ubiquitous and wearables technologies, the amount and type of data that can be gathered about users and used to build user models is expanding. User Model can now be enriched with data regarding different aspects of people’s everyday lives. All these changes bring forth new research questions about the kinds of services which could be provided, the ways for effectively conveying new forms of personalisation and recommendation, and how traditional user modeling should change to exploit ubiquitous and wearable technology to provide these services. In this paper we follow the evolution of user modeling process, starting from the traditional User Model and progressing to RWUM - Real World User Model, which contains data from a person’s everyday life. We tried to answer the above questions and to present a conceptual framework that represents the RWUM process, which might be used as a reference model for designing RWUM-based systems. Finally, we propose some inspiring usage scenarios and design directions that can guide researchers in designing novel, robust and versatile services based on RWUM.