Inference of Human Intentions in Smart Home Environments

Most of context models have limited capability in involving human intention for system evolvability and self-adaptability. Human intention in context aware systems can evolve at any time; however, context aware systems based on these context models can provide only standard services that are often insufficient for specific user needs. Consequently, evolving human intentions result in changes in system requirements. Moreover, an intention must be analyzed from tangled relations with different types of contexts. In the past, this complexity has prevented researchers from using computational methods for analyzing or specifying human intention in context aware system design. The authors investigated the possibility for inferring human intentions from contexts and situations, and deploying appropriate services that users require during system run-time. This paper presents an inference ontology to represent stepwise inference tasks, and then evaluate contexts surrounding a user who accesses PCs through a case study of the smart home environment.