Increasing progress in the development of consumer electronics, as well as the broad use of wireless communication media opens new perspectives for the introduction and use of intelligent and seamless services at home.

Seamless services can be easily personalized. On top of this they are device-independent and multimodal to act suitably for every situation-, e.g. by using positioning information.

Seamless services offer an increase in value by an increase of the comfort for the user, since they hide the complexity of the terminals. A condition for the supply of such services is the convergence of all devices in the household with typical communications equipments, and the interface to information and services should be as simple as possible, e.g. by phonetic input with the help of a speech processing system.

The project is especially occupied with:

Creation of intelligent and pervasive user interfaces between humans and services within the home range. The Multi-Access Service Platform developed at the DAI Labor is to be extended to offer a multimodal service use and to permit the aggregation of services dependening on the current user context within the home range.

Development of a Home Serviceware Framework, which allows a fast and efficient development and supply of seamless services in intelligent environments. The Home Serviceware Framework includes a set of reusable functionalities like for example natural language processing, context- and location-awareness and device independence, in order to realize a service refinement within the home range and to create thus an increase in value for the user.

Realization of two value-added services, a personal newspaper (“personal newspaper delivery”) and a personalized videorecorder (“video timer”), which illustrates the Home Serviceware Frameworks ability for fast and efficient development of seamless services.

The Home Serviceware Framework

The Home Serviceware Framework extends the JIAC Serviceware Framework by the possibility of the service refinement for net-centric services inside the intelligent house. For this internet-based entertainment and information services will be adapted on the users in-house-environment specifications.

Seamless services are based on several base components, which are made available as general components within the Home Serviceware:

• Creation of situation awareness on the basis of an intelligent presence management by tracking users and equipment with RFID.
• Realization of the possibility of uninterrupted service use, in particular when using video and audio data streams over different net infrastructures and terminals by creating an automatic service handover on the basis of the SIP-protocol.
• Realization of device control and medium administration which are based on UPnP.