Context-aware adaptation of mobile video decoding resolution

While the evolution of mobile computing is experiencing considerable growth, it is at the same time seriously threatened by the limitations of battery technology, which does not keep pace with the evergrowing increase in energy requirements of mobile applications. Yet, with the limits of human perception and the diversity of requirements that individuals may have, a question arises of whether the effort should be made to always deliver the highest quality result to a mobile user? In this work we investigate how a user’s physical activity, the spatial/temporal properties of the video, and the user’s personality traits interact and jointly influence the minimal acceptable playback resolution. We conduct two studies with 45 participants in total and find out that the minimal acceptable resolution indeed varies across different contextual factors. Our predictive models inferring the lowest acceptable playback resolution, together with the reduced power consumption we measure at lower resolutions, open an opportunity for saving a mobile’s energy through context-adaptable approximate computing.