Ambient Intelligence - Overview

Overview

More and more people make decisions based on the effect their actions will have on their own inner, mental world. This experience-driven way of acting is a change from the past when people were primarily concerned about the use value of products and services, and is the basis for the experience economy. Ambient intelligence addresses this shift in existential view by emphasizing people and user experience.

The interest in user experience also grew in importance in the late 1990s because of the overload of products and services in the information society that were difficult to understand and hard to use. A strong call emerged to design things from a user's point of view. Ambient intelligence is influenced by user-centered design where the user is placed in the center of the design activity and asked to give feedback through specific user evaluations and tests to improve the design or even co-create the design together with the designer (participatory design) or with other users (end-user development).

In order for AmI to become a reality a number of key technologies are required:

• Unobtrusive hardware (Miniaturization, Nanotechnology, smart devices, sensors etc.)
• Seamless mobile/fixed communication and computing infrastructure (interoperability, wired and wireless networks, service-oriented architecture, semantic web etc.)
• Dynamic and massively distributed device networks, which are easy to control and program (e.g. service discovery, auto-configuration, end-user programmable devices and systems etc.)
• Human-centric computer interfaces (intelligent agents, multimodal interaction, context awareness etc.)
• Dependable and secure systems and devices (self-testing and self repairing software, privacy ensuring technology etc.)