In recent years, we have witnessed a rapid surge in assisted living technologies due to a rapidly aging society. The aging population, the increasing cost of formal health care, the caregiver burden, and the importance that the individuals place on living independently, all motivate development of innovative-assisted living technologies for safe and independent aging. In this survey, we will summarize the emergence of `ambient-assisted living” (AAL) tools for older adults based on ambient intelligence paradigm. We will summarize the state-of-the-art AAL technologies, tools, and techniques, and we will look at current and future challenges.

A Survey on Ambient-Assisted Living Tools for Older Adults

http://iihm.imag.fr/publs/2003/Calvary-IwC2003.pdf

A Unifying Reference Framework for multi-target user interfaces

▶ Addresses the accessibility, usability, and, ultimately, acceptability of Information Society Technologies by anyone, anywhere, at anytime, and through any media and device. ▶ Focuses on theoretical, methodological, and empirical research, of both technological and non-technological nature. ▶ Features papers that report on theories, methods, tools, empirical results, reviews, case studies, and best-practice examples.

Universal access in the information society

This paper introduces a knowledge-driven approach to real-time, continuous activity recognition based on multisensor data streams in smart homes The approach goes beyond the traditional data-centric methods for activity recognition in three ways First, it makes extensive use of domain knowledge in the life cycle of activity recognition Second, it uses ontologies for explicit context and activity modeling and representation Third and finally, it exploits semantic reasoning and classification for activity inferencing, thus enabling both coarse-grained and fine-grained activity recognition In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of smart homes and Activities of Daily Living (ADL) upon which we built both context and ADL ontologies We present a generic system architecture for the proposed knowledge-driven approach and describe the underlying ontology-based recognition process Special emphasis is placed on semantic subsumption reasoning algorithms for activity recognition The proposed approach has been implemented in a function-rich software system, which was deployed in a smart home research laboratory We evaluated the proposed approach and the developed system through extensive experiments involving a number of various ADL use scenarios An average activity recognition rate of 9444 percent was achieved and the average recognition runtime per recognition operation was measured as 25 seconds

A Knowledge-Driven Approach to Activity Recognition in Smart Homes

Advances in artificial intelligence, sensors and big data management have far-reaching societal impacts. As these systems augment our everyday lives, it becomes increasing-ly important for people to understand them and remain in control. We investigate how HCI researchers can help to develop accountable systems by performing a literature analysis of 289 core papers on explanations and explaina-ble systems, as well as 12,412 citing papers. Using topic modeling, co-occurrence and network analysis, we mapped the research space from diverse domains, such as algorith-mic accountability, interpretable machine learning, context-awareness, cognitive psychology, and software learnability. We reveal fading and burgeoning trends in explainable systems, and identify domains that are closely connected or mostly isolated. The time is ripe for the HCI community to ensure that the powerful new autonomous systems have intelligible interfaces built-in. From our results, we propose several implications and directions for future research to-wards this goal.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3173574.3174156

Trends and Trajectories for Explainable, Accountable and Intelligible Systems: An HCI Research Agenda

To realise an Ambient Intelligence environment, it is paramount that applications can dispose of information about the context in which they operate, preferably in a very general manner. For this purpose various types of information should be assembled to form a representation of the context of the device on which aforementioned applications run. To allow interoperability in an Ambient Intelligence environment, it is necessary that the context terminology is commonly understood by all participating devices. In this paper we propose an adaptable and extensible context ontology for creating context-aware computing infrastructures, ranging from small embedded devices to high-end service platforms. The ontology has been designed to solve several key challenges in Ambient Intelligence, such as application adaptation, automatic code generation and code mobility, and generation of device specific user interfaces.

/pdf/towards-an-extensible-context-ontology-for-ambient-42dz8mqzd6.pdf

Towards an Extensible Context Ontology for Ambient Intelligence

Constructing multi-device interfaces still presents major challenges, despite all efforts of the industry and several academic initiatives to develop usable solutions. One approach which is finding its way into general use, is XML-based User Interface descriptions to generate suitable User Interfaces for embedded systems and mobile computing devices. Another important solution is Model-based User Interface design, which evolved into a very suitable but academic approach for designing multi-device interfaces. We introduce a framework, Dygimes, which uses XML-based User Interface descriptions in combination with selected models, to generate User Interfaces for different kinds of devices at runtime. With this framework task specifications are combined with XML-based User Interface building blocks to generate User Interfaces that can adapt to the context of use. The design of the User Interface and the implementation of the application code can be separated, while smooth integration of the functionality and the User Interface is supported. The resulting interface is location independent: it can migrate over devices while invoking functionality using standard protocols.

Dygimes: Dynamically Generating Interfaces for Mobile Computing Devices and Embedded Systems

In a time where mobile computing devices and embedded systems gain importance, too much time is spent to reinventing user interfaces for each new device. To enhance future extensibility and reusability of systems and their user interfaces we propose a runtime user interface description language, which can cope with constraints found in embedded systems and mobile computing devices. XML seems to be a suitable tool to do this, when combined with Java. Following the evolution of Java towards XML, it is logical to introduce the concept applied to mobile computing devices and embedded systems.

/pdf/an-xml-based-runtime-user-interface-description-language-for-u1iwmwewby.pdf

An XML-Based Runtime User Interface Description Language for Mobile Computing Devices

Model-Based User Interface Development uses a multitude of models which are related in one way or another. Usually there is some kind of process that starts with the design of the abstract models and progresses gradually towards the more concrete models, resulting in the final user interface when the design process is complete. Progressing from one model to another involves transforming the model and mapping pieces of information contained in the source model onto the target model. Most existing development environments propose solutions that apply these steps (semi-)automatically in one way only (from abstract to concrete models). Manual intervention that changes the target model (e.g. dialog model) to the designer preferences is not reflected in the source model (e.g. task model), thus this step can introduce inconsistencies between the different models. In this paper, we identify some rules that can be manually applied to the model after a transformation has taken place. The effect on the target and source models are shown together with how different models involved in the transformation can be updated accordingly to ensure consistency between models.

The mapping problem back and forth: customizing dynamic models while preserving consistency

Translation environments offer various translation aids to support professional translators. However, translation aids typically provide only limited justification for the translation suggestions they propose. In this paper we present Intellingo, a translation environment that explores intelligibility for translation aids, to enable more sensible usage of translation suggestions. We performed a comparative study between an intelligible version and a non-intelligible version of Intellingo. The results show that although adding intelligibility does not necessarily result in significant changes to the user experience, translators can better assess translation suggestions without a negative impact on their performance. Intelligibility is preferred by translators when the additional information it conveys benefits the translation process and when this information is not part of the translator's readily available knowledge.

Karin Coninx

Papers

Towards an Extensible Context Ontology for Ambient Intelligence

Dygimes: Dynamically Generating Interfaces for Mobile Computing Devices and Embedded Systems

An XML-Based Runtime User Interface Description Language for Mobile Computing Devices

The mapping problem back and forth: customizing dynamic models while preserving consistency

Intellingo: An Intelligible Translation Environment