Cooking guide: Direct and indirect form of interaction in the digital kitchen environment

This paper explores the potential of ambient cueing in assisting cooking activities in the digital kitchen environment.An application has been developed which given the opportunity to receive feedback and guidance related to cooking tasks through ambient displays.This challenge of balancing the need to incorporate feedback and guidance with the cooking tasks is addressed through the development of two forms of user interface; direct and indirect.The results of this study suggest that the indirect form of interaction produce a physical distraction in task performance but more interestingly produces cognitive disruptions.Meanwhile, direct form of interaction provides a standard and natural cooking interface that contributes more advantages in terms of cooking performance and accessing digital information

A Smart Kitchen for Ambient Assisted Living

The kitchen environment is one of the scenarios in the home where users can benefit from Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications. Moreover, it is the place where old people suffer from most domestic injuries. This paper presents a novel design, implementation and assessment of a Smart Kitchen which provides Ambient Assisted Living services; a smart environment that increases elderly and disabled people’s autonomy in their kitchen-related activities through context and user awareness, appropriate user interaction and artificial intelligence. It is based on a modular architecture which integrates a wide variety of home technology (household appliances, sensors, user interfaces, etc.) and associated communication standards and media (power line, radio frequency, infrared and cabled). Its software architecture is based on the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi), which allows building a complex system composed of small modules, each one providing the specific functionalities required, and can be easily scaled to meet our needs. The system has been evaluated by a large number of real users (63) and carers (31) in two living labs in Spain and UK. Results show a large potential of system functionalities combined with good usability and physical, sensory and cognitive accessibility

Learning from the veg box: designing unpredictability in agency delegation

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to enable applications that foster a more efficient, sustainable, and healthy way of life. If end-users are to take full advantage of these developments we foresee the need for future IoT systems and services to include an element of autonomy and support the delegation of agency to software processes and connected devices. To inform the design of such future technology, we report on a breaching experiment designed to investigate how people integrate an unpredictable service, through the veg box scheme, in everyday life. Findings from our semi-structured interviews and a two- week diary study with 11 households reveal that agency delegation must be warranted, that it must be possible to incorporate delegated decisions into everyday activities, and that delegation is subject to constraint. We further discuss design implications on the need to support people’s diverse values, and their coordinative and creative practices

A Contextual Inquiry of People with Vision Impairments in Cooking

Individuals with vision impairments employ a variety of strategies for object identification, such as pans or soy sauce, in the culinary process. In addition, they often rely on contextual details about objects, such as location, orientation, and current status, to autonomously execute cooking activities. To understand how people with vision impairments collect and use the contextual information of objects while cooking, we conducted a contextual inquiry study with 12 participants in their own kitchens. This research aims to analyze object interaction dynamics in culinary practices to enhance assistive vision technologies for visually impaired cooks. We outline eight different types of contextual information and the strategies that blind cooks currently use to access the information while preparing meals. Further, we discuss preferences for communicating contextual information about kitchen objects as well as considerations for the deployment of AI-powered assistive technologies.Comment: CHI 202

Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi)

This is a technical report including the papers presented at the Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi) that took place in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Pisa, Italy on November 13, 2012. The motivation for organizing the workshop was the wish to learn from past experience on Ambient Intelligence systems, and in particular, on the lessons learned on the system architecture of such systems. A significant number of European projects and other research have been performed, often with the goal of developing AmI technology to showcase AmI scenarios. We believe that for AmI to become further successfully accepted the system architecture is essential

Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi)

This is a technical report including the papers presented at the Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi) that took place in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Pisa, Italy on November 13, 2012. The motivation for organizing the workshop was the wish to learn from past experience on Ambient Intelligence systems, and in particular, on the lessons learned on the system architecture of such systems. A significant number of European projects and other research have been performed, often with the goal of developing AmI technology to showcase AmI scenarios. We believe that for AmI to become further successfully accepted the system architecture is essential

HamkeRun: Mobile infoVis app towards sustainable motivation in a context of running

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than half of all adults in the US meet basic physical activity guidelines. Physical activity can help not just improve physical and mental health but also reduce the risk of heart disease and some cancers. Researchers and companies have tried to investigate the use of modern technologies to motivate people to increase and maintain physical activities. However, in spite of these efforts, there are criticisms. Those include low dietary effectiveness of the tools, lack of sustainable effects in the long-term, and proof of effectiveness only shown in laboratory settings. To overcome these limitations, first, the author developed a framework of overarching motivation theories and HCI factors and contextualized it within the running domain. Second, the author has developed a mobile application called HamkeRun within this framework, using the concepts of information visualization, gamification, and social grouping to increase a user’s motivation to run more frequently. Third, the HamkeRun application was empirically tested through a two-month-long longitudinal experiment and follow-up interviews. The results showed that the single runner type showed significant increases in the levels of their external motivation (motivational effect of the HamkeRun application), internal motivation and satisfaction, while the team runner type showed significant increases only in internal motivation. In addition, motivational effects were also different depending on the runners’ behavior change stage. Runners at the maintenance stage showed significant increases in external motivation, internal motivation, satisfaction, and total number of running activities performed during the study. Although action stage runners showed significant increase in internal motivation, female runners at the action stage showed significant decrease in their external motivation. Gamification greatly influenced increases of external motivation, internal motivation and total number of actual activities. Although both male and female runners showed increased internal motivation, significant increase in external motivation was only found in male runners. The dissertation closes with a series of design guidelines for application developers and designers which may help develop motivational tools in other health-related domains

Human activity recognition for pervasive interaction

PhD ThesisThis thesis addresses the challenge of computing food preparation context in the kitchen. The automatic recognition of fine-grained human activities and food ingredients is realized through pervasive sensing which we achieve by instrumenting kitchen objects such as knives, spoons, and chopping boards with sensors. Context recognition in the kitchen lies at the heart of a broad range of real-world applications. In particular, activity and food ingredient recognition in the kitchen is an essential component for situated services such as automatic prompting services for cognitively impaired kitchen users and digital situated support for healthier eating interventions. Previous works, however, have addressed the activity recognition problem by exploring high-level-human activities using wearable sensing (i.e. worn sensors on human body) or using technologies that raise privacy concerns (i.e. computer vision). Although such approaches have yielded significant results for a number of activity recognition problems, they are not applicable to our domain of investigation, for which we argue that the technology itself must be genuinely “invisible”, thereby allowing users to perform their activities in a completely natural manner. In this thesis we describe the development of pervasive sensing technologies and algorithms for finegrained human activity and food ingredient recognition in the kitchen. After reviewing previous work on food and activity recognition we present three systems that constitute increasingly sophisticated approaches to the challenge of kitchen context recognition. Two of these systems, Slice&Dice and Classbased Threshold Dynamic Time Warping (CBT-DTW), recognize fine-grained food preparation activities. Slice&Dice is a proof-of-concept application, whereas CBT-DTW is a real-time application that also addresses the problem of recognising unknown activities. The final system, KitchenSense is a real-time context recognition framework that deals with the recognition of a more complex set of activities, and includes the recognition of food ingredients and events in the kitchen. For each system, we describe the prototyping of pervasive sensing technologies, algorithms, as well as real-world experiments and empirical evaluations that validate the proposed solutions.Vietnamese government’s 322 project, executed by the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training

Smart kitchen for Ambient Assisted Living

El envejecimiento de la población es una realidad en todos los países desarrollados. Las predicciones de crecimiento de esta población son alarmantes, planteando un reto para los servicios sociales y sanitarios. Las personas ancianas padecen diversas discapacidades que se van acentuando con la edad, siendo más propensas a sufrir accidentes domésticos, presentando problemas para realizar tareas cotidianas, etc. Esta situación conlleva a una pérdida paulatina de capacidades que en muchas ocasiones acaba con la vida autónoma de la persona. En este contexto, las Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación (TIC) aplicadas al entorno doméstico pueden jugar un papel importante, permitiendo que las personas ancianas vivan más tiempo, de forma independiente en su propio hogar, presentando, por tanto, una alternativa a la hospitalización o institucionalización de las mismas. Este trabajo da un paso más en este sentido, presentando el diseño y desarrollo de un Ambiente Inteligente en la cocina, que ayuda a las personas ancianas y/o con discapacidad a desempeñar sus actividades de la vida diaria de una forma más fácil y sencilla. Esta tesis realiza sus principales aportaciones en dos campos: El metodológico y el tecnológico. Por un lado se presenta una metodología sistemática para extraer necesidades de colectivos específicos a fin de mejorar la información disponible por el equipo de diseño del producto, servicio o sistema. Esta metodología se basa en el estudio de la interacción Hombre-Máquina en base a los paradigmas y modelos existentes y el modelado y descripción de las capacidades del usuario en la misma utilizado el lenguaje estandarizado propuesto en la Clasificación Internacional del Funcionamiento, de la Discapacidad y de la Salud (CIF). Adicionalmente, se plantea el problema de la evaluación tecnológica, diseñando la metodología de evaluación de la tecnología con la finalidad de conocer su accesibilidad, funcionalidad y usabilidad del sistema desarrollado y aplicándola a 61 usuarios y 31 profesionales de la gerontología. Desde un punto de vista técnico, se afronta el diseño de un ambiente asistido inteligente (Ambient Assisted Living, AAL) en la cocina, planteando y definiendo la arquitectura del sistema. Esta arquitectura, basada en OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative), oferta un sistema modular, con altas capacidades de interoperabilidad y escalabilidad. Además, se diseña e implementa una red de sensores distribuida en el entorno con el fin de obtener la mayor información posible del contexto, presentando distintos algoritmos para obtener información de alto nivel: detección de caídas o localización. Todos los dispositivos presentes en el entorno han sido modelados utilizando la taxonomía propuesta en OSGi4AmI, extendiendo la misma a los electrodomésticos más habituales de la cocina. Finalmente, se presenta el diseño e implementación de la inteligencia del sistema, que en función de la información procedente del contexto y de las capacidades del usuario da soporte a las principales actividades de la vida diaria (AVD) en la cocina