Multiple parallel signal streams are produced by the sensors (20, 30, 40, 50) associated with a device (10). Events corresponding to real-world activities, contexts, environments, internal-states, uses, interactions and the like involving the device (10) can be detected in the multi-channel sensor-signal stream by evaluating how the pattern of coordination between the different sensors varies over time. The pattern of coordination between the sensors can be evaluated for a particular time period by computing an information distance matrix (IDM) for the sensor-signals generated during that time period. The IDM summarizes the normalized information distance between each possible pairing of the sensors.