This paper describes a system that can observe, recognise and analyse human movements, to provide this awareness to context-aware applications. The movement recognition and characterisation components of this sentient system are described in detail. The system uses the ground reaction force to classify and analyse movements in an non-clinical environment. The signal is classified using statistical pattern recognition. Equipped with knowledge of the movement, characterisation is the process of analysing the ground reaction force to extract parameters of the movement. The components of the movement awareness system operate in a distributed computing environment.