User requirements for intelligent home environments

Ambient Intelligence, 2005

As technologies in the area of storage, connectivity and displays evolve rapidly and business developments point to the direction of the experience economy, the vision of Ambient Intelligence is positioning human needs central to technology development. This chapter describes concerted research efforts surrounding the HomeLab, a special research instrument that supports scientific investigations of the interaction between humans and technology. Such investigations reach beyond traditional usability and technology acceptance, aiming to characterize the nature of user experiences, measuring them and designing them. Starting from a historical view upon the vision of Ambient Intelligence, this chapter presents the HomeLab, the rationale for its set-up and three related studies that were conducted within it. These studies have focused on technology use at home for leisure purposes; more specifically they have explored the experience of immersion from displays that extend beyond screen boundaries to encompass the lighting in a room, and the experience of social presence and connectedness with remote friends and family as they result from peripheral awareness displays.

Ambient Intelligence is an emerging discipline that brings intelligence to our everyday environments and makes those environments sensitive to us. Ambient Intelligence research builds upon advances in sensors and sensor networks, pervasive computing, and artificial intelligence. Because these contributing fields have experienced tremendous growth in the last few years, Ambient Intelligence research has strengthened and expanded.

2018

Smart home technologies have not been widely adopted by mainstream users despite their availability and the benefits they can offer (e.g., better energy management, improved security and assisted living). Based on an extensive review of smart home research, Wilson, Hargreaves and Hauxwell-Baldwin (2015) argue that the reason for this slow adoption is the technology-centered approach used in their development and propose that following a user-centered approach would be a solution. A user-centered approach to smart homes technologies requires exploration of users’ expectations of future homes. An important step in this exploration is deciding on the user group, i.e., whose expectations will be examined. Selecting individuals from appropriate technology adoption categories (Rogers, 2003) is key to produce knowledge that can be used to design technologies desirable for a wider audience. This is because consumers from different technology adoption categories usually have different charac...

2017

Smart home is becoming a focus in both literature and product development practices. The current study employed a human-centered design approach to understand users desires and expectations from their living context. Six critical themes were developed via in-deep interview, field observation, and data analysis. They are house as a supportive friend, atmosphere generator, theme songs for every moment, coordinator and reminder, life memory collector, and routine builder for young generations. Those concepts were partially integrated to define the value proposition for the target user group of parents with young children. This guides the design ideation and video prototyping to illustrator the user experiences. Through a focus group discussion, the design concepts were validated with six potential customers. The results also show that the design concept has the potential to motivate children’s behaviors, help to build their routine, and has the flexibility to fulfill different needs to...

Sensors, 2019

The emergence of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) paradigm and the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services unveiled new potentials for the domain of domestic living, where the line between “the computer” and the (intelligent) environment becomes altogether invisible. Particularly, the residents of a house can use the living room not only as a traditional social and individual space where many activities take place, but also as a smart ecosystem that (a) enhances leisure activities by providing a rich suite of entertainment applications, (b) implements a home control middleware, (c) acts as an intervention host that is able to display appropriate content when the users need help or support, (d) behaves as an intelligent agent that communicates with the users in a natural manner and assists them throughout their daily activities, (e) presents a notification hub that provides personalized alerts according to contextual information, and (f) becomes an intermediary c...

This paper discusses a novel architecture of intelligent user services that address the domain of networked home environments. The work described in this paper represents the central achievements of the first 1.5 years in the work package on intelligent user services within the EU-IST funded research project Amigo. The discussed service architecture consists of five distinct services that address both user-and system oriented issues in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) home environments.

2006

Abstract Based on the results of a 3-year interdisciplinary study, this article presents an approach in which proactive information technology was introduced into homes, and discusses the derived design principles from a human-centered perspective. The application of proactive computing in homes will face particularly sensitive conditions, as familiar and reliable household elements remain strongly preferred.

Dwelling environment is not intelligent if it does not include the concept of home. The emergence of ICT allowed new functions as well as new ways of performing the traditional ones. The need to be online does not remove the need of privacy and to print the site. New ways of living require rethinking dwelling typology to flexibility. Intelligent environments will appear to elevate the sense of home, where security, autonomy, independence, comfort and interaction will be crucial to promote a more qualified life. Technological solutions can be driven in different directions: energy efficiency; lightening and temperature control, video surveillance, access control, etc., assistive environments; entertainment solutions like home theater and professional ones; all have in common to conceive the environment that matches user's expectancies, where human interaction emerges as a crucial requirement. 978-1-907349-02-7 7

The entry of proactive technology into highly sensitive environments, such as the home, produces specific design challenges that are inextricably linked to ethical issues. Two design goals are presented and analysed: proactive solutions have to be both personalized and consistent. These requirements are partially contradictory, and need to be understood in the context of the sociocognitive setting of the home. The embedding of proactive technology into a home environment has to provide the user with an awareness of the possibilities of control and play. These design goals are further developed with regard to different user cultures: here we concentrate on early adopters and elderly people.