Nowadays in information retrieval it is generally accepted that if we can better understand the context of searchers then this could help the search process, either at indexing time by including more metadata or at retrieval time by better modelling the user needs. In this work we explore how activity recognition from tri-axial accelerometers can be employed to model a user's activity as a means of enabling context-aware information retrieval. In this paper we discuss how we can gather user activity automatically as a context source from a wearable mobile device and we evaluate the accuracy of our proposed user activity recognition algorithm. Our technique can recognise four kinds of activities which can be used to model part of an individual's current context. We discuss promising experimental results, possible approaches to improve our algorithms, and the impact of this work in modelling user context toward enhanced search and retrieval. © 2011 IEEE.