Intelligent environments for all: a path towards technology-enhanced human well-being

Abstract

Emerging intelligent environments are considered to offer significant opportunities to positively impact human life, both at an individual and at a societal level, and in particular to provide useful means to support people in their daily life activities and thus improve well-being for everybody, especially for older people and for people with limitations of activities. In this context, accessibility and usability, although necessary, are not sufficient to ensure that applications and services are appropriately designed to satisfy human needs and overcome potential functional limitations in the execution of everyday activities fundamental for well-being. This position paper puts forward the claim that, in order to achieve the above objective, it is necessary that: (i) the design of Assistive Intelligent Environments is centered around the well-being of people, roughly intended as the possibility of executing the (everyday) human activities necessary for living (independently), thus emphasizing usefulness in addition to usability; (ii) the technological environment is orchestrated around such activities and contains knowledge about how they are performed and how people need to be supported to perform them; (iii) the environment makes use of monitoring and reasoning capabilities in order to adapt, fine-tune and evolve over time the type and level of support provided, and this process takes place considering ethical values; (iv) the applications must also support the possibility of contact with other people, who in many cases may be the only effective help. Moving forward from the Design for All paradigm, this paper discusses how the latter can be revisited under the perspective of technology’s usefulness and contribution to human well-being. Subsequently, it introduces a practical notion of well-being based on the ICF classification of human functions and activities and discusses how such notion can constitute the starting point and the focus of design approaches targeted to assist people in their everyday life mainly (but not exclusively) in the home environment. As a subsequent step, the need for integrating Artificial Intelligence capabilities in assistive intelligent environments is discussed, based on the complexity of the human problems to be addressed and the diversity of the types of support needed. The proposed approach is exemplified and illustrated through the experience acquired in the development of four applications, addressing vital aspects of human life, namely nutrition, stress management, sleep management and counteracting loneliness. Finally, based on the acquired experience, the need to take into account ethical values in the development of assistive intelligent environments is discussed.