Boris E. R. de Ruyter

New research perspectives on Ambient Intelligence

Ten years of AmI research have led to many new insights and understandings about the way highly interactive environments should be designed to meet the requirement of being truly unobtrusive and supportive from an end-user perspective. Probably the most revealing finding is the fact that, in addition to cognitive intelligence and computing, also elements from social intelligence and design play a dominant role in the realization of the vision. In this paper we discuss these novel insights and their resulting impact on the AmI research landscape. We introduce a number of new AmI research perspectives that are related to social intelligence and in addition we argue that new ways of working are required applying the concept of Experience Research resulting in a true user-centered approach to Ambient Intelligence.

Connecting the family with awareness systems

Awareness systems have attracted significant research interest for their potential to support interpersonal relationships. Investigations of awareness systems for the domestic environment have suggested that such systems can help individuals stay in touch with dear friends or family and provide affective benefits to their users. Our research provides empirical evidence to refine and substantiate such suggestions. We report our experience with designing and evaluating the ASTRA awareness system, for connecting households and mobile family members. We introduce the concept of connectedness and its measurement through the Affective Benefits and Costs of communication questionnaire (ABC-Q). We inform results that testify the benefits of sharing experiences at the moment they happen without interrupting potential receivers. Finally, we document the role that lightweight, picture-based communication can play in the range of communication media available.

Keeping in touch with the family: home and away with the ASTRA awareness system

This paper describes research in supporting close family members living apart to keep in touch with each other. We introduce an awareness system for supporting lightweight social communication between mobile individuals and people at home. Communication is based on pictures, short messages and reachability information. A field test has provided empirical evidence that affective benefits, to this point only hypothesized by researchers in awareness systems, are indeed experienced by users of our system.

Assessing the effects of building social intelligence in a robotic interface for the home

This paper reports an exploration of the concept of social intelligence in the context of designing home dialogue systems for an Ambient Intelligence home. It describes a Wizard of Oz experiment involving a robotic interface capable of simulating several human social behaviours. Our results show that endowing a home dialogue system with some social intelligence will: (a) create a positive bias in the users perception of technology in the home environment, (b) enhance user acceptance for the home dialogue system, and (c) trigger social behaviours by the user in relation to the home dialogue system.

Ambient assisted-living research in carelab

overwhelming need for information and communication technology (ICT) based consumer health and wellness applications. One of the high potential growth areas is in elder care: According to the World Health Organization, the proportion of people age 60 and over worldwide is growing faster than any other age group [4]. Hence, there will also be a reduction in the number of people who can provide care to these seniors. This clearly points to an opportunity for technological solutions to support independent living for seniors. Ambient Assisted Living refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people and provide assistive propositions for maintaining an independent lifestyle. Health and wellness applications span the continuum from fitness applications up to remote patientmonitoring systems for chronic-care patients. The development of these solutions requires continuous user involvement to ensure a seamless fit with user needs and preferences and to promote care-provider endorsement.

Ambient intelligence: visualizing the future

As technologies in the area of storage, connectivity and displays are rapidly evolving and business development is pointing to the direction of the experience economy, the vision of Ambient Intelligence is positioning the human needs central to technology development. Equipped with a special research instrument called HomeLab, scenarios of Ambient Intelligence are implemented and tested. As two examples of bringing real user experiences through display technology into the digital home, research on creating the feeling of immersion and the feeling of being connected, are discussed. Results from this work indicate that visual displays can indeed be used beyond simple information rendering but can actually play an important role in creating user experiences.

Personalizing persuasive technologies

This paper discusses how persuasive technologies can be made adaptive to users. We present persuasion profiling as a method to personalize the persuasive messages used by a system to influence its users. This type of personalization can be based on explicit measures of users? tendencies to comply to distinct persuasive strategies: measures based on standardized questionnaire scores of users. However, persuasion profiling can also be implemented using implicit, behavioral measures of user traits. We present three case studies involving the design, implementation, and field deployment of personalized persuasive technologies, and we detail four design requirements. In each case study we show how these design requirements are implemented. In the discussion we highlight avenues for future research in the field of adaptive persuasive technologies. Author-HighlightsPersuasive technologies can be more effective if they are personalized.We introduce persuasion profiles to personalize persuasive messages.Persuasion profiles can be effective using implicit or explicit measures.In three case studies we show the effects of personalized persuasion.

Persuasion in ambient intelligence

Although the field of persuasive technologies has lately attracted a lot of attention, only recently the notion of ambient persuasive technologies was introduced. Ambient persuasive technologies can be integrated into every aspect of life, and as such have greater persuasive power than the traditional box like machines. This article discusses ambient persuasion and poses a model that structures the knowledge from social sciences on persuasion, attitude change, and behavior change. Using this model the challenges of ambient persuasive technologies to fulfill its persuasive promises are identified. From the ambient persuasion model it is clear that ambient persuasive technologies can go beyond traditional persuasive technologies by being context and situational aware, by interpreting individual differences between users, and by being a social actor in their own right.

Daily activities diarist: supporting aging in place with semantically enriched narratives

The Daily Activities Diarist is an awareness system that supports social connectedness between seniors living alone and their social intimates. The Daily Activities Diarist extracts automatically an Activity-of-Daily-Life (ADL)-journal from data collected through a wireless sensor network installed at the home of the seniors. We describe the design of the system, its implementation and the lessons from two trials lasting 2 weeks each. The paper makes the case for narrative presentation of awareness information and for seamful design of awareness systems of this ilk.

Measuring Affective Benefits and Costs of Mediated Awareness: Development and Validation of the ABC-Questionnaire

The interactions and relationships we have with other people form an essential social network that supports us and adds meaning to our lives. This well-known fact is illustrated by the massive success of communication media such as e-mail, mobile telephony, and text messaging and the massive adoption of social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter. This basic insight can be traced back to the days of Aristotle, or even earlier. Maslov’s theory of human needs, formulated in the 1950s, illustrates that social interaction is essential to satisfying human needs at several levels, in particular needs for belonging, love, and esteem, although even at the more basic levels of physiological and safety needs, communication and coordination is essential to mental and physical well-being, and ultimately survival (see, e.g., House et al. 1988). Reflecting this sentiment, Schutz (1966)describes three basic human needs in his interpersonal needs theory: inclusion, control, and affection. Inclusion refers to the need for the company and recognition of others, to ‘establish and maintain a feeling of mutual interest with other people’ (p. 18). It allows one to feel significant and worthwhile. Control refers to the need to feel a competent, responsible person and to establish a feeling of mutual respect for the competence and responsibleness of others. Affection is the need to form emotionally close relationships with other human beings, to establish and maintain a feeling of mutual affection, to love and be loved. Baumeister and Leary (1995) argue in their belongingness hypothesis that ‘human beings have a pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships.’ They stress that this drive cannot be satisfied by frequent interactions with strangers but, rather,