Germán Montoro

A Prototype of a Context-Based Architecture for Intelligent Home Environments

This paper presents a proposal of a context-based architecture to achieve the required synergy among the ubiquitous computing devices of an intelligent environment. These devices produce context information that models the behaviour of the environment. This context information is the glue among the devices and the context-aware applications. The generated context information provides a common view of the world. A blackboard architecture allows to share this context information and a context model is proposed to represent it. A prototype of such a smart room has been developed, including several devices as well as a set of context-aware demonstrators. They work together employing the context information stored on the blackboard.

Easing the smart home: Semi-automatic adaptation in perceptive environments

This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, (project TIN2004-03140) and by U.A.M-Grupo Santander (project Itech Calli), and is part of the UAM-SOLUZIONA AmI Laboratory research program. Special thanks to Eran Eden and Manuel Freire for their recommendations.

A Mechanism for Solving Conflicts in Ambient Intelligent Environments

Ambient Intelligence scenarios describe situations in which multitude of devices and agents live together. In this kind of scenarios is frequent to see the appearance of conflicts when modifying the state of a device as for example a lamp. Those problems are not as much of sharing of resources as of conflict of orders coming from different agents. This coexistence must deal also with the desire of privacy of the different users over their personal information such as where they are, what their preferences are or to whom this information should be available. When facing incompatible orders over the state of a device it turns necessary to make a decision. In this paper we propose a centralised mechanism based on prioritized FIFO queues to decide the order in which the control of a device is granted. The priority of the commands is calculated following a policy that considers issues such as the commanders role, commands type, contexts state and commander-context and commander-resource relations. Finally we propose a set of particular policies for those resources that do not adjust to the general policy. In addition we present a model pretending to integrate privacy through limiting and protecting contextual information.

A Plug and Play Spoken Dialogue Interface for Smart Environments

In this paper we present a plug and play dialogue system for smart environments. The environment description and its state are stored on a domain ontology. This ontology is formed by entities that represent real world contextual information and abstract concepts. This information is complemented with linguistic parts that allow to automatically create a spoken interface for the environment. The spoken interface is based on multiple dialogues, related to every ontology entity with linguistic information. Firstly, the dialogue system creates appropriate grammars for the dialogues. Secondly, it creates the dialogue parts, employing a tree structure. Grammars support the recognition process and the dialogue tree supports the interpretation and generation processes. The system is being tested with a prototype formed by a living room. Users may interact with and modify the physical state of this living room environment by means of the spoken dialogue interface.

Adaptive manuals as assistive technology to support and train people with acquired brain injury in their daily life activities

Assistive technologies and ubiquitous computing can be related since both try to help people in their lives. This common objective motivated us to develop and evaluate a system that puts ubiquitous computing technologies into the rehabilitation process of people with acquired brain injury. Thus, in this paper, we present and evaluate a system that shows adaptive manuals for daily-life activities for people with acquired brain injury. This first evaluation allowed us to validate our approach and also to extract valuable information about these systems as well as environmental factors that may affect the patients.

Context Adaptive Interaction with an Automatically Created Spoken Interface for Intelligent Environments

In this paper we present the interpretation and generation processes of a spoken dialogue interface for intelligent environments. The interface is automatically created for each specific environment and the interpretation and generation vary depending on the environment and its context. These processes rely on a dialogue tree structure. Several modules process the tree structure and the environment context information to produce specific dialogues for the current environment state. Dialogues are provided with clarification, error recovering, anaphora resolution and other capabilities. The interface is implemented in a real intelligent environment laboratory.

AmICog – mobile technologies to assist people with cognitive disabilities in the work place

This paper presents the system AmICog, designed specifically to assist people with cognitive disabilities in their workplaces. To do that we employ mobile devices for two different purposes: on the one hand, to show interactive guides adapted to the user, the task and the user’s context. On the other hand, to locate and provide directions in indoors environments.

Emotional Self-Regulation of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Smartwatches for Monitoring and Interaction

In this paper, we analyze the needs of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to have a pervasive, feasible and non-stigmatizing form of assistance in their emotional self-regulation, in order to ease certain behavioral issues that undermine their mental health throughout their life. We argue the potential of recent widespread wearables, and more specifically smartwatches, to achieve this goal. Then, a smartwatch system that implements a wide range of self-regulation strategies and infers outburst patterns from physiological signals and movement is presented, along with an authoring tool for smartphones that is to be used by caregivers or family members to create and edit these strategies, in an adaptive way. We conducted an intensive experiment with two individuals with ASD who showed varied, representative behavioral responses to their emotional dysregulation. Both users were able to employ effective, customized emotional self-regulation strategies by means of the system, recovering from the majority of mild stress episodes and temper tantrums experienced in the nine days of experiment in their classroom.

Adaptive Interfaces for People with Special Needs

This paper covers those aspects of modern interfaces which expand and enhance the way in which people interact with computers, like multi-touch table systems, presence-detection led displays and interactive virtualized real-life environments. It elaborates on how disabled or conditioned people take great advantage of natural interaction as interfaces adapt to their needs; interfaces which can be focused towards memory, cognitive or physical deficiencies. Applications size-up to serve specific users with customized tools and options, and are aware while taking into account the state and situation of the individual.

Using Smartphones to Assist People with Down Syndrome in Their Labour Training and Integration: A Case Study

This article describes a proposal and case study based on mobile phones and QR Codes to assist individuals with cognitive disabilities in their labour training and integration. This proposal, named AssisT-Task, is a full functional mobile application for Android smartphones and offers step-by-step guidance, establishing a learning method through task sequencing. It has been tested with a group of 10 users and 2 types of labour tasks. Through 7 recorded sessions, we compared the performance and the learning progress with the tool against the traditional assisting method, based on paper instructions. The results show that people with cognitive disabilities learnt and performed better and faster when using AssisT-Task than the traditional method, particularly on tasks that require cognitive effort rather than manual skills. This learning has proved to be essential to obtain an adequate degree of personal autonomy for people with cognitive impairment.