| Smart Environments |
| Written by Sebastian Feuerstack | |
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Peoples’ homes are currently flooded with a growing number of intelligent devices providing more and more ’useful’ features. New smart home devices are introduced as well as additional house control and telecommunication systems, each loaded with numerous complex functions making the handling increasingly difficult for end-users and developers. At the same time the number of available net-centric services grows continuously, providing personalized and ubiquitous access to information. These two environments are yet still separated, but there is an increasing need for a new generation of services aggregating functionality and integrating home-based and net-centric services. We call this new class of services enabling access, configuration and usage in an intuitive way ’Seamless Home Services’. One of the biggest problems of the fusion between the home- and net-centric services is in their different ways of interaction. Net-centric services get accessed by a web browser using point-and-click style interaction and usually rely on a graphical interface and a keyboard and mouse control, whereas home-based services need to be able to be accessed anywhere in the home and even from outside the home as well. My specific interests are about identifying the basic characteristics and requirements that needed to be implemented by a Seamless Home Service. So far five properties have been identified: (1) Adaptivity, to adapt to the context of use. (2) Session Management, to handle interruptions of use and the possibility to continue later even in a different context of use. (3) Migration, to let a service migrate between different devices and modalities to follow the user. (4) Distribution, to distribute an interaction with a service to several devices and modalities complementary or redundant. (5) Multimodality, to simultaneously support and combine multiple modalities during the interaction. 2006
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| Last Updated ( Sunday, 01 February 2009 ) |