Towards FollowMe User Profiles for Macro Intelligent Environments

We envision an Ambient Intelligent Environment as an environment with technology embedded within the framework of that environment to help enhance an users experience in that environment. Existing implementations , while working effectively, are themselves an expensive and time consuming investment. Applying the same expertise to an environment on a monolithic scale is very inefficient, and thus, will require a different approach. In this paper, we present this problem, propose theoretical solutions that would solve this problem, with the guise of experimentally verifying and comparing these approaches, as well as a formal method to model the entire scenario

Desenvolvimento de um Smart Object : Wakeme Pillow

Mestrado em Comunicação MultimédiaA proliferação dos smart&objects e wearables,no dia a dia dos consumidores, tem contribuído ativamente para a mudança de hábitos e comportamentos dos mesmos, dado que estes item como objectivo o bem estar e o incentivo à mudança de determinados factores dos consumidores. Daí este estudo parte de todo o conhecimento de alguns produtos tendo o intuito de criar uma solução que por uma lado possa enriquecer a experiência, oferecendo eficiência e por outro a capacidade de personalização do despertar. A investigação começa numa fase inicial por analisar a problemática relacionada com a temática e em estudo, realizando uma revisão bibliográfica de forma a compreender o contexto da temática abordada bem como reunir algumas características e especificidades de produtos disponíveis no mercado. O estudo empírico parte da realização de entrevistas a utilizadores e a um inquérito online, de forma a compreender as expectativas de funcionalidades para um novo produto mas por outro lado garantindo que as características mais utilizadas atualmente estejam integradas. O desenvolvimento do protótipo, uma almofada, envolve-o Utilizador em todas as fases cruciais da construção do mesmo, garantindo desta forma que o smart&object desenvolvido, cumpre com os requisitos de quem o vai utilizar. Com os resultados obtidos, demonstram se as potencialidades desta solução, mas sobretudo criam se várias oportunidades relevantes não só para o melhoramento do protótipo actual mas também diferentes áreas de investigação que não foram abordados neste estudo. !The proliferation of smart objects and wearable’s, in the daily lives of consumers, has actively contributed to the changing habits and behaviors, as these aims the welfare and encourage them to move certain factors consumers. Hence this study part of all knowledge of some products with the aim of creating a solution that on the one hand can enrich the experience, offering efficiency and the other hand, improve the customization of awakening. The investigation begins at an early stage by analyzing the problems related to the topic under study, conducting a literature Review in order to understand the theme of context addressed and gather some product features and specifics available. The empirical study of conducting user interviews and an online questionnaire in order to understand the expectations of features! for a new product but on the other hand ensuring that the most used features are now integrated. The development of the prototype, a cushion, involves the user in all key stages of the construction of it, thus ensuring that the smart object developed, complies with the requirements of those who will use. With the results, we show the potential of this solution, but above al! it creates several important opportunities not only to improve the current prototype but also different research areas that were not covered in this study

Ubiquitous Robotics System for Knowledge-based Auto-configuration System for Service Delivery within Smart Home Environments

The future smart home will be enhanced and driven by the recent advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), which advocates the integration of computational devices within an Internet architecture on a global scale [1, 2]. In the IoT paradigm, the smart home will be developed by interconnecting a plethora of smart objects both inside and outside the home environment [3-5]. The recent take-up of these connected devices within home environments is slowly and surely transforming traditional home living environments. Such connected and integrated home environments lead to the concept of the smart home, which has attracted significant research efforts to enhance the functionality of home environments with a wide range of novel services. The wide availability of services and devices within contemporary smart home environments make their management a challenging and rewarding task. The trend whereby the development of smart home services is decoupled from that of smart home devices increases the complexity of this task. As such, it is desirable that smart home services are developed and deployed independently, rather than pre-bundled with specific devices, although it must be recognised that this is not always practical. Moreover, systems need to facilitate the deployment process and cope with any changes in the target environment after deployment. Maintaining complex smart home systems throughout their lifecycle entails considerable resources and effort. These challenges have stimulated the need for dynamic auto-configurable services amongst such distributed systems. Although significant research has been directed towards achieving auto-configuration, none of the existing solutions is sufficient to achieve auto-configuration within smart home environments. All such solutions are considered incomplete, as they lack the ability to meet all smart home requirements efficiently. These requirements include the ability to adapt flexibly to new and dynamic home environments without direct user intervention. Fulfilling these requirements would enhance the performance of smart home systems and help to address cost-effectiveness, considering the financial implications of the manual configuration of smart home environments. Current configuration approaches fail to meet one or more of the requirements of smart homes. If one of these approaches meets the flexibility criterion, the configuration is either not executed online without affecting the system or requires direct user intervention. In other words, there is no adequate solution to allow smart home systems to adapt dynamically to changing circumstances, hence to enable the correct interconnections among its components without direct user intervention and the interruption of the whole system. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient, adaptive, agile and flexible system that adapts dynamically to each new requirement of the smart home environment. This research aims to devise methods to automate the activities associated with customised service delivery for dynamic home environments by exploiting recent advances in the field of ubiquitous robotics and Semantic Web technologies. It introduces a novel approach called the Knowledge-based Auto-configuration Software Robot (Sobot) for Smart Home Environments, which utilises the Sobot to achieve auto-configuration of the system. The research work was conducted under the Distributed Integrated Care Services and Systems (iCARE) project, which was designed to accomplish and deliver integrated distributed ecosystems with a homecare focus. The auto-configuration Sobot which is the focus of this thesis is a key component of the iCARE project. It will become one of the key enabling technologies for generic smart home environments. It has a profound impact on designing and implementing a high quality system. Its main role is to generate a feasible configuration that meets the given requirements using the knowledgebase of the smart home environment as a core component. The knowledgebase plays a pivotal role in helping the Sobot to automatically select the most appropriate resources in a given context-aware system via semantic searching and matching. Ontology as a technique of knowledgebase representation generally helps to design and develop a specific domain. It is also a key technology for the Semantic Web, which enables a common understanding amongst software agents and people, clarifies the domain assumptions and facilitates the reuse and analysis of its knowledge. The main advantages of the Sobot over traditional applications is its awareness of the changing digital and physical environments and its ability to interpret these changes, extract the relevant contextual data and merge any new information or knowledge. The Sobot is capable of creating new or alternative feasible configurations to meet the system’s goal by utilising inferred facts based on the smart home ontological model, so that the system can adapt to the changed environment. Furthermore, the Sobot has the capability to execute the generated reconfiguration plan without interrupting the running of the system. A proof-of-concept testbed has been designed and implemented. The case studies carried out have shown the potential of the proposed approach to achieve flexible and reliable auto-configuration of the smart home system, with promising directions for future research