Presenting the networked home: a content analysis of promotion material of Ambient Intelligence applications

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) for the home uses information and communication technologies to make users’ everyday life more comfortable. AmI is still in its developmental phase and is headed towards the first stages of diffusion. \ud Characteristics of AmI design can be observed, among others, in the promotion material of initial producers. A literature study revealed that AmI originally envisioned a central role for the user, convenience that AmI offers them and that attention should be paid to critical policy issues such as privacy and a potential loss of freedom. A content analysis of current promotion material of several high-tech companies revealed that these original ideas are not all reflected in the material. Attributes which were used most in the promotion material were ‘connectedness’, ‘control’, ‘easiness’ and ‘personalization’. An analysis of the pictures in the promotion material showed that almost half of the pictures contained no humans but appliances. These results only partly correspond to the original vision on AmI, since the emphasis is now on technology. The results represent a serious problem, since both users, as well as critical policy issues are underexposed in the current promotion material

Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) art in care of ageing society: focus on dementia

open access articleBackground: Art enhances both physical and mental health wellbeing. The health benefits include reduction in blood pressure, heart rate, pain perception and briefer inpatient stays, as well as improvement of communication skills and self-esteem. In addition to these, people living with dementia benefit from reduction of their noncognitive, behavioural changes, enhancement of their cognitive capacities and being socially active. Methods: The current study represents a narrative general literature review on available studies and knowledge about contribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in creative arts. Results: We review AI visual arts technologies, and their potential for use among people with dementia and care, drawing on similar experiences to date from traditional art in dementia care. Conclusion: The virtual reality, installations and the psychedelic properties of the AI created art provide a new venue for more detailed research about its therapeutic use in dementia

Surveying human habit modeling and mining techniques in smart spaces

A smart space is an environment, mainly equipped with Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, able to provide services to humans, helping them to perform daily tasks by monitoring the space and autonomously executing actions, giving suggestions and sending alarms. Approaches suggested in the literature may differ in terms of required facilities, possible applications, amount of human intervention required, ability to support multiple users at the same time adapting to changing needs. In this paper, we propose a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that classifies most influential approaches in the area of smart spaces according to a set of dimensions identified by answering a set of research questions. These dimensions allow to choose a specific method or approach according to available sensors, amount of labeled data, need for visual analysis, requirements in terms of enactment and decision-making on the environment. Additionally, the paper identifies a set of challenges to be addressed by future research in the field

Data degradation to enhance privacy for the Ambient Intelligence

Increasing research in ubiquitous computing techniques towards the development of an Ambient Intelligence raises issues regarding privacy. To gain the required data needed to enable application in this Ambient Intelligence to offer smart services to users, sensors will monitor users' behavior to fill personal context histories. Those context histories will be stored on database/information systems which we consider as honest: they can be trusted now, but might be subject to attacks in the future. Making this assumption implies that protecting context histories by means of access control might be not enough. To reduce the impact of possible attacks, we propose to use limited retention techniques. In our approach, we present applications a degraded set of data with a retention delay attached to it which matches both application requirements and users privacy wishes. Data degradation can be twofold: the accuracy of context data can be lowered such that the less privacy sensitive parts are retained, and context data can be transformed such that only particular abilities for application remain available. Retention periods can be specified to trigger irreversible removal of the context data from the system

Machine Understanding of Human Behavior

A widely accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. If this prediction is to come true, then next generation computing, which we will call human computing, should be about anticipatory user interfaces that should be human-centered, built for humans based on human models. They should transcend the traditional keyboard and mouse to include natural, human-like interactive functions including understanding and emulating certain human behaviors such as affective and social signaling. This article discusses a number of components of human behavior, how they might be integrated into computers, and how far we are from realizing the front end of human computing, that is, how far are we from enabling computers to understand human behavior

Cognitive assisted living ambient system: a survey

The demographic change towards an aging population is creating a significant impact and introducing drastic challenges to our society. We therefore need to find ways to assist older people to stay independently and prevent social isolation of these population. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide various solutions to help older adults to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and live independently for a time. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a field to investigate innovative technologies to provide assistance as well as healthcare and rehabilitation to impaired seniors. The paper provides a review of research background and technologies of AAL

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications