BioQ: Towards Context-Aware Multi-Device Collaboration with Bio-cues

The rapid growth of wearable devices has opened exciting opportunities for context-aware multi-device collaboration, where multiple devices can provide enhanced user experience tailored to user needs and conditions. However, it also presents a unique challenge of reliably determining whether a set of wearables is being used by the same individual. In real-world scenarios, device sharing, exchanging, or unintended use can cause privacy risks and degraded functionality. Existing solutions primarily rely on accelerometer data to match movement patterns across devices, but they perform poorly during stationary or varied non-repetitive activities. In this paper, we introduce BioQ, a method that unobtrusively detects wearable co-location by generating and matching bio-cues. These bio-cues are generated from on-body wearable sensor data and embedded into a common latent space. Furthermore, when devices share the same sensor types, BioQ can effectively integrate multiple sensor sources to improve cue generation and matching. Experimental results show that BioQ outperforms baselines in bio-cue generation and matching and is resource-effective in model training, inference, and energy use. Our code is available at https://github.com/Nokia-Bell-Labs/contextual-biological-cues.