Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments

Ten years of research in Ambient Intelligence have revealed that the original ideas and assertions about the way the concept should develop no longer hold and should be substantially revised. Early scenario's in Ambient Intelligence envisioned a world in which individuals could maximally exploit personalized, context aware, wireless devices thus enabling them to become maximally productive, while living at an unprecedented pace. Environments would become smart and proactive, enriching and enhancing the experience of participants thus supporting maximum leisure possibly even at the risk of alienation. New insights have revealed that these brave new world scenarios are no longer desirable and that people are more in for a balanced approach in which technology should serve people instead of driving them to the max. This novel approach is called Synergetic Prosperity, referring to meaningful digital solutions that balance mind and body, and community and earth thus contributing to a prosperous and sustainable development of mankind.

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) promises future environments that support the well-being of their inhabitants through comfort and assistive environments. For the elderly users, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) scenarios are targeting safe and independent living at home. Especially the integration of home automation components, such as intelligent light, window, and climate controls seem promising for such scenarios. In this paper, we present a new development method that is based on a detailed three-dimensional model and show how the model can be used for designing and evaluating assistive environments. Such a system has been developed and deployed. We present an architectural foundation of how Universal Remote Console technology can be applied to synchronize the virtual environment model with the real world. Furthermore, we extend previous work on Dual Reality by introducing the concept of Synchronized Realities that includes the synchronization between remote AmI environments. We will discuss application scenarios and show two demonstrators that we have implemented based on the proposed development method.

In this paper we describe an opportunity that Ambient Intelligence provides outside the domains typically associated with it. We present a concept for enhancing child development by introducing tangible computing in a way that fits the children and improves current education. We argue that the interfaces used should be simple and make sense to the children. The computer should be hidden and interaction should take place through familiar play objects to which the children already have a connection. Contrary to a straightforward application of personal computers, our solution addresses cognitive, social and fine motor skills in an integrated manner. We illustrate our vision with a concrete example of an application that supports the inevitable transition from free play throughout the classroom to focused play at the desk. We also present the validation of the concept with children, parents and teachers, highlighting that they all recognize the benefits of tangible computing in this domain.

An awareness system was designed to provide peace of mind and a sense of connectedness to adults who care for an elderly parent living alone. The iterative design of the Aurama awareness system showed and our empirical research, including field trials ranging from four to six months, confirm the potential of awareness systems to support both generations suggesting that research should examine, firstly, how to convey long-term trends regarding the wellbeing of the elderly and, secondly, how to intertwine the communication of awareness information with expressive forms of communication. We further explore the role that formal care providers can play when caring for the elderly using the awareness system. We discuss implications of our studies for the design of ambient intelligent systems supporting awareness between elderly, their adult children and care providers, and derive several lessons learned in conducting long-term field trials.

There is increasing interest in context-aware applications, ranging from traffic routing, location-based services, friend finding, context-aware messaging, virtual tour guides, to physical world search. We make three observations: (i) many context-aware applications use knowledge about the individuals (and groups of people), places and objects within a particular place, that is, they are place-based, (ii) such knowledge about a place can be shared by different applications and reused, without each application having the same knowledge reengineered (there is at least overlap among such knowledge across different applications), and (iii) applications can not only be consumers of knowledge but also be contributors of knowledge about the place. We propose the PlaceComm framework for building such context-aware applications with “place” as a key abstraction, where place knowledge can be collected and shared. The knowledge is structured using an ontology called the Place-Based Virtual Community ontology. Our framework utilizes a multiagent architecture for modularity, separation of concerns and extensibility. We also describe three applications built using our approach: PlaceGuide, PlaceAware and PlaceSense.

On September 21, 2010, the author successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis entitled Multi-Camera Vision for Smart Environments at Stanford University.

The edited volume “Multimedia techniques for device and ambient intelligence” consists of two parts: i) an introduction to a variety of basic low level image processing techniques, leaving aside other modalities, and ii) work on high level, knowledge based processing, including interesting chapters on context aware computing and graph based pattern recognition. However, in the search for ambient multimedia techniques, the book can only partly redeem its promise.