Assignment 2 for csc 400 by YI CHU

ITRG Proposal:Designing compelling home experience for old people

Introduction

Nowadays, information and computing technologies are becoming more and more pervasive in our everyday life. The development in the field of wireless networking, sensor technology, mobile computing, human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence are combined to bring forward a compelling vision of ubiquitous computing, in which computing technologies are integrated seamlessly into our lives. Ubiquitous computing, by definition, is the attempt to break away from traditional desktop computing and moves the computational power into the environment that surrounds us.[1]A ubiquitous computing system will be able to sense the continuously changing context of its user and act in prediction of people's needs and interests. Thus, we say the system acquires a sense of context-awareness. This context may refer to any kind of sources of information that can be used to identify the user's situation, such as user's location, time, temperature, people nearby, user's profile and physical and psychological state. The most important feature of ubiquitous computing system is that it requires minimal user's attention so that people's everyday activities are disturbed as little as possible. Because the system is context-aware, it knows what kind of service or information is needed, when is the most proper time to present intelligent service, and how to present it. For example, a portable guiding system for tourists can pop up useful information about traveling routes, like the nearest restaurant,famous resort or interesting stories relevant to the place people visited according to people's location and personal interests. Such a system is bound to give user a much more enjoyable interactive experience.

 

Research Idea

Ubiquitous computing technologies can be applied into every aspect of people's lives, including work, shopping, play and home. In this paper we are talking about designing a ubiquitous home environment for the care of the elderly people. Home is perhaps the most important place for many old people since they have been retired from work. So how to make home experience comfortable and also interesting is one critical issue that is of great significance. A lot of effort have been put into this research subject and there have been model systems of smart homes that could undertake many routine tasks for people automatically, monitor the home environment, and give alarm when emergency occurs. Those systems are quite capable in one sense, but equipping a home with all kinds of capabilities is not the ultimate goal of our design. We want to build a home that is comfortable for old people, but a home system that automatically implementing all kinds of jobs for people can often annoyingly disturb people's lives. Or even, old people will feel frustrating in such an intelligent environment as it seems like they cannot do things without the help of computing devices. So an ideal intelligent home system is one that could not only easy old people's lives but also provide a compelling and challenging home experience.  To do this, the home system will have to try giving help in a more implicit way through putting forward hints or options that will require a certain amount mental effort. And indeed, the elderly will actually learn from this interactive experience. For instance, how will a home decide whether to turn on the heater or nor? The system will display some information on the wall about the room temperature, humidity or the physical state of the inhabitant and  some other relevant knowledge and might suggest on turning on the heater. Then the old people will decide on their own whether or not do it and also learns that this temperature is perhaps not proper for their health. Besides, the home might give instructions while people are cooking. There are a great amount of other things that this system can do for its user, and all of them will depend upon the system's ability to respond to the user's context, in a appropriate way.

 

Research Plan

To build such an ubiquitous home system, we need to make efforts into the following aspects.

The underlying infrastructure that supports the whole system. This will involve issues on the wireless networking and sensing technologies, and portable or wearable devices that could also capture raw information data.

A middle-ware that is capable of interpretating data from sensors into useful contextual information, and also responsive to the changing demands from the application level. Here we might use some AI techniques to analyze various sources of information, transform them into standard format, classify them into hierachies, and design mechanizms that could flexibly make use of these different kinds of information in a combined way. Finally, we aim to recognize the context of the user and then reason about their activities.

 An effective human-computer interface that is seamlessly embedded into the environment. The most difficult part is how to design such a natural interface that don't bother the users.  As we can see there will be many interactive activities in a ubiquitous environment. We need much knowledge that is beyond the typical study of computer science, such as the study of human behavior, to guide us in the design work. A key aspect of work will be the means of displaying information, how to represent it in a way adapted to various situations if of great importance in a ubiquitous computing environment.

Human factors in our system. We also need to work on issues regarding the old people's perception and acceptance of these new information technologies. That is, the relation between people and technology. Only when the facts about the technology's influence on people becomes intelligible to us can we hope to design a system that is enjoyable to people. Then we can accomplish what we have talked about above that to make home experience interesting and challenging. To do this, we need much of empirical investigation on how people acts in such a environment. There are also many other human issues involved such as individual privacy which requires much attention.

 

Conclusion

In a word,  an ubiquitous computing system can behave in a way that is suitable to the user's context. And building a ubiquitous computing home environment involves a great many of complicated issues. One issue of critical significance is to make sure that  our system is welcome to its user. Our idea is that the system's behaves in a way that will give old people more self-assurance and self-confidence while helping and teaching them in a appropriate way. There are a great amount of research issues, most of them are interdisciplinary,  and the work has only just began. But since the vision is so compelling, there is definitely no reason that we don not devote our best effort into realizing it.

 

Reference

[1]Gregory D. Abowd. Ubiquitous Computing: Research Themes and Open Issues from an Applications Perspective GVU Technical Report GIT-GVU-96-24. December 1996.