En Com PAs-2 - Extended Home Concept

Extended Home Concept

One of the main subjects EnComPas-2 is focused on is the Extended Home concept. This concept deals with the home based services being accessible to the user his own home: car, office, other houses…

In the extended home scenario, the resources and services are distributed over several physically separated domains that are interconnected and interoperable. The resultant extended home is a virtual domain that enables the user to have similar application experiences as if he was accessing services in his primary home. At the end, the key aspect consists in the integration of services with the environment of the user, so that he loses the conscience of using intensively different technologies.

To achieve this goal, some new challenges are needed to be faced, both technical and social. The first of them is the environment and the background which has evolved:

• The home is now the main scenario but not the only one. Other scenarios are to be taken into account: when the user is driving, when he is walking in the street… The technologies, devices and possible services should be adapted to these scenarios. Indeed, one main aspect is the implementation of the service continuity between the different scenarios: For example, one question to be addressed is how a service provided in a car should move to the home scenario.
• As mentioned, the applications should be provided in a natural way for the end users. This implies that the applications need to be adapted to really fit the different users’ living standards, with minimal user intervention. To perform this operation, it is needed that the users and the context are properly identified, parameterised and that the applications collect user preferences automatically and are able of applying different profiles to different users.
• User acceptance of the applications and services is also crucial to develop the new ambient applications that will fit the expectations, as they will continue to be attractive, useful and easy for the end users.
• Last but not least, these scenarios (services and devices) need to be correctly configured and managed in an efficient and effective way, to be able to provide the services for the residential market. Therefore, a platform, flexible and adaptable to the different scenarios is also needed to correctly provision all these new services