Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
and toolkits. An increasingly popular approach is to iteratively progress working and
reasonably stable prototypes towards more and more functionality - agile methods.
Software Design principles can be applied also to the design of interaction
interfaces in AAL. It means to systematically apply state-of-the-art knowledge about
available interaction technologies to the critical usability factors for the AAL service at
hand. An emerging alternative approach is co-creation, where end-users participate
actively in specifying the interfaces, and sometimes collectively own the results. Living
Labs can enable designers to make fast design iterations based on user feedback in
realistic settings.
Over time, the interaction design process is expected to evolve from sequential
software engineering towards a much stronger involvement of co-creating end-users in
a highly iterative design process, or there can be automatic creation of interfaces that
scale complex content to match the capabilities of the user.
5.4.2.
User Context Detection
AAL services should account for the user's situation, which we take to be the user's will
or behaviour pattern as determined by sensing and reasoning as described in sections
5.1 and 5.2. This issue is known as context-awareness and concerns context
information that describes the user, further decomposing into Personal, Application,
Social and Physical.
Awareness
A central theme in AAL is context awareness. The commonly accepted definition of
Context is “any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity.
An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction
between a user and an application, including the user and application themselves“ (Dey,
2001).
Systems will be aware of the context of use, including more or less static user
preferences and living patterns. These patterns are different for each user, and the
details of them vary dynamically with location and time. Context awareness enables
personalization and adaptation of user-system interaction, and can also be enhanced
with abilities for learning living patterns as they evolve. This forms the basis for
adapting, learning and predicting interaction configurations.
Automated reasoning about physical or emotional parameters, enables detection of
the current situation, as described in section 5.2.3. Since AAL systems will probably
have difficulty to reliably infer the correct intention of the situation, it is expected that
user input will sometimes be needed to adjust the interaction configuration. To create
trusted products, we should therefore make sure that users can inspect and update what
is the currently assumed situation and the interaction configuration associated with
different situations.
Over time, awareness technologies are expected to evolve from today's mostly
predefined rules based on physical parameters towards adaptive, learning and
predicting awareness modules that are to some extent also depending on detection of
emotional parameters of the user.
Situations
The role of a context management system is to acquire information coming from
various sources, ranging from physical sensors to Internet applications, combine these
