Section: Application Domains

The Smart Spaces Research Plateforme

Participants : Patrick Reignier, Dominique Vaufreydaz, Remi Barraquand, Augustin Lux, James Crowley, Lukas Rummelhard, Amaury Negre.

Project PRIMA has recently moved to a new Smart Spaces Research Plateforme in order to develop and test components and services for context aware human centered services. The Smart Spaces Research Plateforme is a 50 Square Meter space equipped with a microphone array, wireless lapel microphones, wide angle surveillance cameras, panoramic cameras, steerable cameras, scanning range sensors and two camera-projector video-interaction devices, and a KNX smart electrical system. The microphone array is used as an acoustic sensor to detect, locate and classify acoustic signals for recognizing human activities. The wide-angle and panoramic cameras provide fields of view that cover the entire room, and allows detection and tracking of individuals. Steerable cameras are used to acquire video of activities from any viewing direction.

Context aware human centered services may categorized as tools, advisors, or media. Tool services are designed to perform a specific task or function as robustly as possible. If any adaptation is involved, it should serve to adapt the function to a changing environment. The user interface, and any interaction with users should be perfectly predictable. The degree to which the operation of a tool should be transparent, visible or hidden from the user is an open research question. Advisor services observe the users actions and environment in order to propose information on possible courses of actions. Advisors should be completely obedient and non-disruptive. They should not take initiatives or actions that cannot be overridden or controlled by the user. Media services provide interpersonal communications, entertainment or sensorial extension.

Examples of human centered tool services include:

• An activity log recording system that records the events and activities of an individual's daily activities.

• A service that integrates control of heating, air-conditioning, lighting, windows, window-shades, exterior awnings, etc to provide an optimum comfort level defined in terms of temperature, humidity, CO2, acoustic noise and ambient light level.

• A service that manages the available stock of supplies in a home and orders supplies over the Internet to assure that the appropriate level of supplies are always available.

• A service to measure the walking rate, step size and posture of an elderly person to estimate health and predict the likelihood of a fall.

Some examples of advisor services include:

• A service that provides shopping advice about where and when to shop.

• A service that can propose possible menus based on the available food stuffs in the kitchen.

• A service that observes the activities of humans and appliances within the home and can suggest ways to reduce the cost of heating, electricity or communications.

• A service that observes lifestyle and can offer advice about improving health.

Some examples of media services include

• A service that maintains a sense of informal non-disruptive presence with distant family members.

• A robot device that communicates affection.

• A device that renders the surface temperature of wall, floors and windows to show energy consumption and loss within a house.

• Services that enable seamless tele-presence for communication with others