Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
applicable to pervasive computing spaces in general, and composed of separate
physical sensor platforms, service, knowledge, context management, and application
layers, built around the Open Services Gateway Alliance (OSGi) (OSGi Alliance 2008)
framework.
The Aware Home Research Initiative started in 1999 at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, with the construction of a house composed of a couple of identical flats,
and the definition of two research agendas: a technology-centred one focused on
context awareness and ubiquitous sensing, on person-environment interaction and on
specific solutions like a “smart floor”, or a “Frequently Lost Objects finder”; and a
human-centred one, addressing as specific applications those providing support to older
people ageing in that place, for example at home (Kidd, 1999). Some examples of the
applications developed in the framework of the Aware Home Research Initiatives are:
the Gesture Pendant, a wireless device to be worn around the neck, with an embedded
camera and motion sensors, that can monitor user- activity levels and accept commands
in the form of hand gestures; the Cook´s Collage, a prototype system providing
surrogate memory support for general cooking tasks, by emphasizing the temporal
order of cooking events and arranging visual snapshots as a series of panels, similar to
a comic strip, on a flat-panel display mounted on a kitchen cabinet; the Digital Family
Portrait, an in-home monitoring system that informs family members about an older
relative's daily activities, health status and potential problems, by creating a
visualization of the older person's day at home from available sensor information and
displaying the information to a family member in a different location by means of
iconic representations of information (Mynatt, 2004).
Household robotic appliances
Personal robots are being investigated also as robotic appliances. An example (Yoshimi,
2004) deals with the need for simplifying the use of home-network systems, whose
usability, in particular by older users, is often quite low. In this framework, a Robotic
Information Home Appliance is conceived as an advanced human interface aimed at
connecting advanced home appliances or information equipment and their users, and
making control of such apparatus easier.
The most successful robotic appliance is the iRobot Roomba, a consumer floor-
cleaning robot based on an idea developed as a prototype in 1989 for a students´
competition at the Mobile Robotic Group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The development of the commercial version of the robot - as reported by the author -
was led by five principles: application is primary, cost matters, only real-world testing
can reveal a robot's flaws, “usually” is unreliable and complexity kills (Yoshimi, 2004).
Floor cleaning has been until today by far the most successful application for
household robots; besides the iRobot Roomba described above, a number of other
products have reached the consumer market during the last five years, especially in
Korea, where service robots with floor-cleaning functionalities have been developed
among others by Hanool Robotics and by Samsung Electronics.
Most products constructed so far have not been able to successfully move from the
status of prototype to commercial product for a number of reasons, including cost,
design and acceptability issues, insufficient focus on application and the fact of often
being designed to satisfy the “special needs” of a specific user group.
Besides this, consumer robotics - and in general, all technologies for AAL - suffer from
an important lack of universally accepted standards to support multi-part development
of interoperating devices and systems.
