Smart Home Research

Smart Homes are environments facilitated with technology that act in a protective and proactive function to assist an inhabitant in managing their daily lives specific to their individual needs. A typical Smart Home implementation would include sensors and actuators to detect changes in status and to initiate beneficial interventions. This paper aims to introduce the diversity of recent Smart Home research and to present the challenges that are faced not only by engineers and potential inhabitants, but also by policy makers and healthcare professionals

Designing Interactive Architecture

Interactive architecture bridges in itself two design traditions, i.e. design of interactive systems on the one hand, and architecture as the tradition of designing our built environment on the other hand. This article reports from our ongoing project focused on the design and implementation of an interactive environment for public use. The article describes the project, reviews and outlines the main design challenges as pinpointed in the literature on interactive architecture, and describes the practical challenges identified in this particular project. This article then presents the participatory design approach adopted in this project to overcome these challenges, and describes and analysis the methodological implications from this project. These implications include the lessons learned from the coordination of a geographically distributed design team, “role gliding” as the reinterpretation of the designers as users in the participatory design process, and a shift from communities of practices to mixtures of professions.

Ambient Communication Experience (ACE), Information Interaction in Design Space

A changing computing landscape is expected to sense the physical world yet remain concealed within its very infrastructure to provide virtual services which are discreetly networked, omnipresent yet non-intrusive. Ambient Information Systems (AIS), permit a mode of expression that can easily exist at the level of subconscious realisation. This research focuses on the development of an Ambient Communication Experience (ACE) system. ACE is a synchronisation framework to provide co-ordinated connectivity across various environmentally distributed devices via sensor data discovery. The intention is to facilitate location-independent and application-responsive screening for the user, leading to the concept of technologically integrated spaces. The aim is to deliver contextual information without the need for direct user manipulation, and engagement at the level of peripheral perception.

Life in the Pocket - The Ambient Life Project

The work reported in this article is concerned with the relationship of the user to his mobile phone, especially with the habit of checking the mobile phone for missed events. We present two qualitative studies that have been conducted with mobile phones, symbolizing their status through life-like movements - breath and pulse. It was to be determined whether a continuous, rythmic and life-like signal would be eligible to ambiently express the phone’s state. The results of the studies were mixed, as some users were simply annoyed by the permanent actuation, while others appreciated the functionality. The response times to occured events seem to be appropriate for an ambient display. The studies raised further questions, regarding the psychological and physiological consequences of such technology.

Improving an Ambient Intelligence Based Multi-Agent System for Alzheimer Health Care using Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper describes last improvements made on ALZ-MAS; an Ambient Intelligence based multi-agent system aimed at enhancing the assistance and health care for Alzheimer patients. The system makes use of several context-aware technologies that allow it to automatically obtain information from users and the environment in an evenly distributed way, focusing on the characteristics of ubiquity, awareness, intelligence, mobility, etc., all of which are concepts defined by Ambient Intelligence. Among these context-aware technologies we have Wireless Sensor Networks. In this sense, ALZ-MAS is currently being improved by the use of a new platform of ZigBee devices that provides the system with new telemonitoring and locating engines.

Distributed Schema-Based Middleware for Ambient Intelligence Environments

In this work we present a middleware developed for Ambient Intelligence environments. The proposed model is based on the blackboard metaphor, which is logically centralized but physically distributed. Although it is based on a data-oriented model, some extra services have been added to this middle layer to improve the functionality of the modules that employ it. The system has been developed and tested in a real Ambient Intelligence environment.

Staged Façades

Media façades, realized through projection systems, could be a promising technology for scalable public displays in urban spaces. With low requirements regarding the infrastructure and virtually no influence on the buildings’ fabric, projected façades offer exceptional flexibility and extensibility as well as easy maintenance. As cities are increasingly confronted with digital signage products besides other public display systems, a projector-based system offers the possibility to be switched off and restore the screen to its previous state in the blink of an eye. We present the prototypical implementation of a “Staged Façades Framework” leveraging a façade’s structure and ornamentation for dynamically adapting pieces of multimedia content.

Adaptive Awareness of Hospital Patient Information through Multiple Sentient Displays

Sentient computing can provide ambient intelligence environments with devices capable of inferring and interpreting context, while ambient displays allow for natural and subtle interactions with such environment. In this paper we propose to combine sentient devices and ambient displays to augment everyday objects. These sentient displays are aware of their surroundings while providing continuous information in a peripheral, subtle, and expressive manner. To seamlessly convey information to multiple sentient displays in the environment, we also propose an approach based on abstract interfaces which use contextual information to decide which display to use and how the information in the display changes in response to the environment. Our approach is illustrated through a hospital monitoring application. We present the design of two sentient displays that provide awareness of patient’s urine outputs to hospital workers, and how contextual information is used to integrate the functionality of both displays.

Context-Aware Pervasive Services for Smart Cities

Smart environments support the activities of individuals by enabling context-aware access to pervasive information and services. This article presents the iTransIT framework for building such context-aware pervasive services in Smart Cities. The iTransIT framework provides an architecture for conceptually integrating the independent systems underlying Smart Cities and a data model for capturing the contextual information generated by these systems. The data model is based on a hybrid approach to context-modelling that incorporates the management and communication benefits of traditional object-based context modelling with the semantic and inference advantages of ontology-based context modelling. The iTransIT framework furthermore supports a programming model designed to provide a standardised way to access and correlate contextual information from systems and ultimately, to build context-aware pervasive services for Smart Cities. The framework has been assessed based on a prototypical realisation of an architecture for integrating diverse intelligent transportation systems in Dublin and by building context-aware pervasive transportation services for urban journey planning and for visualising traffic congestion.

RFID-Enabled Location Determination within Indoor Environments

The ability to track the real-time location and movement of items or people offers a broad range of useful applications in areas such as safety, security and the supply chain. Current location determination technologies, however, have limitations that heavily restrict how and where these applications are implemented, including the cost, accuracy of the location calculation and the inherent properties of the system. The Global Positioning System (GPS), for example, cannot function indoors and is useful only over large-scaled areas such as an entire city. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an automatic identification technology which has seen increasingly prominent use over the last few decades. The technology uses modulated Radio Frequency signals to transfer data between its two main components, the reader and the transponder. Its many applications include supply chain management, asset tracking, security clearance and automatic toll collection. In recent years, advancements in the technology have allowed the location of transponders to be calculated while interfacing with the reader. This article documents an investigation into using an active RFID based solution for tracking.