Mohamed Ali Feki

The Internet of Things: The Next Technological Revolution

A wide range of researchers from academia and industry, as well as businesses, government agencies, and cities, are exploring the technologies comprising the Internet of Things from three main perspectives: scientific theory, engineering design, and the user experience.

Coupling Context Awareness and Multimodality in Smart Homes Concept

Development of smart home technologies dedicated to people with disabilities provides a challenge in determining accurate requirements and needs in dynamic situations. In this paper we describe the integration of context awareness and multimodal functionalities in a smart environment. We outline how to optimize user comfort and capabilities. Considering the wide range of user types and preferences and the dynamic system environment created by constant introduction of new product and new context. By taking the environmental information provided by the environment, user profile and preferences, context awareness promises easier interaction and new possibilities such as predictive tasks automatically and adapting new situations to user interface. Multimodality permits in one hand to facilitate accessibility to a wide range of users, and the other hand to offer innovative control method of complex systems. In this paper we present our approach for coupling context awareness and multimodality concepts.

Integration of home networking in a smart environment dedicated to people with disabilities

We describe our research activity on the integration of technologies in the environment of people with disabilities who have reduced abilities to perform daily living tasks and who are usually using adapted systems, described as assistive technologies, to compensate, even partly, the problems of daily activities. This paper focuses on the process design of an accessible smart environment, described as the smart homes concept. This process design covers our explanation of the use of smart homes technologies as appropriate solutions to support user needs. We focus on the software infrastructure developed within the smart homes project which started two years ago and provides preliminary evaluation results on users needs in term of assistive technologies and highlights the role of communication protocols to control heterogeneous devices. This project 1 is funded by the GET and the LLR foundation.

User Needs and Usage Analysis in a Smart Environment for People Requiring Assistance

This article describes our research activity, extended at a European level through several projects supported by the European Commission, on smart homes dedicated to older people and people with disabilities. The inability of older adults or persons with disabilities to perform daily living recreational and social activities limits their experience of autonomy and well-being. The goal of our research is to provide service continuity within the living environment, both indoor and outdoor. The rapid development of information and communication technologies is supporting a large variety of new services relevant to the lives of all the segments of the population, especially the elderly and disabled who are dependent on others as a result of physical/cognitive impairment. Combining technological aids and mobile technologies facilitates independent living for all in the home and in temporary living environments.

Enabling the Masses to Become Creative in Smart Spaces

In this chapter we present a first analysis towards the enablement of mass creativity in the Internet of Things, potentially leading to a wide range of new tangible, interactive applications that leverage the fundamental new possibilities of an emerging Web of Things. After an introduction of the socio-cultural practice of ‘Do-it-Yourself’ (DiY) as apparent in society, and a discussion on what DiY can mean for the Internet of Things, we introduce a typology of how people can potentially create and customise on top of the Internet of Things. Based on that, we elaborate three concepts forming a basis for new creation paradigms in such smart spaces, potentially leading to new DiY-enabling functions in Internet of Things service creation environments: the Call-Out Internet of Things, the Smart Composables Internet of Things, and the Phenomena Internet of Things. Next to a discussion of applicable state-of-the-art for implementing parts of these concepts, we show first experimental grounding for them, as part of the ongoing exploration process.

From Smart Home to Smart Space in Independent Living: A Framework for Multiple Contexts Management

During this last decade we have seen that the most suitable application of smart homes targeted independent living of people with disabilities and elderly people. We have seen the emergence of different smart homes prototype developed by several research projects in Europe, North America and Asia. This concept of smart home in a box, which is mainly technology push driven, have two weak points: at first end-users were generally not involved, not user pull driven, and secondly, the smartness of the living environment was limited to the indoor box, even if some remote access functionalities where designed, as soon as the user leaves the box he loose all of the available smartness. In this paper, we describe our research strategy on how to provide a suitable living environment for dependent people based on a push-pull approach. The idea is to focus on the user and provide him the mean to bring part of the home smartness outside in order to interact with unknown environments, as such the bus/train station, the shopping mall, the hospital, and so on. The goal of this research work is not to develop a product, but mainly to focus on a generic framework for service continuity taking into account the user, the environments, and the mobility aspects within known and unknown environments. The ultimate goal is not only to ensure of a coherent matching between the user requirements and the available services, but also the way to interact that we described as human-environment interaction (HEI).

A Novel Approach for Ontology Distribution in Ubiquitous Environments

In this paper, we describe a novel approach for ontology distribution in ubiquitous environments. We present the Context Aware Explorer (CAE) framework we have developed which allows building context aware applications. Our approach, while built upon Web Ontology Language OWL and RDF Schema, is aiming at modeling context ontology for supporting context reasoning and the design of a Smart Rule Engine that maintains a shared model of context for all computing entities in the smart space. The CAE main contribution is its ability to distribute ontology based on abstract parameters related to situation and to user profile. The ultimate goal is to decrease the response time of the reasoning engine with regards to reasoning accuracy. We also describe the implementation of CAE, and its associated ontology, in a prototype demonstrator of smart environment handling indoor and outdoor context aware services. The validation of the ontology distribution approach was applied to assistive environment dedicated to people having motor disabilities and tested within laboratory conditions. Preliminary performance results are presented to highlight the impact of distributed ontology concept.

The role of affordances and interaction bits in the design of a new tangible programming interface: A preliminary result

In this paper, we present three scenarios driven by a set of interactions that we developed to empower non-technical end users to understand, create, and control their smart environment. We used a projected interface with tangible controls and a corresponding interactive system to experiment with ways to 1) teach basic programming constructs to non-technical users, 2) create smart behavior by instantiating a projected template, and 3) control the environment by interacting with a device manager template. We focused on the interaction bits, the affordances of the tangible controls, and the role fiducials — amoeba-like symbols which can be detected and tracked with a camera — may play as a technical starting point for the interactions. We report our preliminary result in the context of a meeting room usability study to validate the scenarios and their interactions.

Ambient intelligence for ubiquitous health and wellbeing

The effects of age-related decline prevent many people from enjoying full, independent, productive, and highquality lives. Smart Homes have been proposed as an innovative solution in an attempt to address these issues in an effort to provide support to both elderly and people with disabilities in their daily life. In addition, Smart Homes technologies (ubiquitous computing) can be used as means to improve both the quality of care and wellbeing of dependent people. In one hand, ubiquitous health-based applications involving monitoring and processing of vital signs and enabling a rapid intervention in case of emergency are expected to become crucial services. In other hand, assistive services could provide a strong impact on the wellbeing of people. With such an approach, two main issues may be addressed: first, the person can remain within their own home and be safe and secure for an extended period of time, and second, offer a reformed approach for the way in which healthcare is delivered and managed. Embedded within these visions of creating a smart environment within which people can live for an extended period of time emerges the notion of ambient intelligent technologies. These technologies offer promising prospects to assist people with special needs. Nevertheless, they are an emerging research field which faces numerous challenges. Ambient Assistive Living (AAL), which is a European initiative, deals with a new vision of the digital world, where computing, devices, and sensors are deployed everywhere (for example, at home, in buildings, and within urban spaces) to assist people. These technologies enable more intelligent and unobtrusive user interaction with the surrounding environment. The AAL community has the goal of including more intelligence within such environments. Such an increased level of intelligence has the potential to provide improved levels of user support in addition to helping users access the knowledge required to offer better decisions when interacting with these environments. With the rapidly growing aging population on a global scale, the need of improving elderly wellbeing is getting crucial. Ambient Intelligence solutions are, therefore, increasingly becoming viable options for independent living. There is a need for increased sophistication in the homes and living environments of the elderly, and in the devices and artifacts that surround these living environments. The focus has moved beyond devices and electronics to reasoning, learning, monitoring, tracking, and providing context aware assistance, all within a framework of building accurate models covering the application domain. Despite the complexity and sophistication of this new generation of smart space, their realization must be intuitive (by providing innovative M. Mokhtari (*) CNRS IPAL (UMI 2955) Singapore, Institut Telecom France, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R/A-STAR), 1 Fusionopolis Way, # 21-01 Connexis (South Tower), Singapore 138632, Singapore e-mail: Mounir.Mokhtari@it-sudparis.eu

The first interaction design pattern library for internet of things user created applications

In this paper, we report our analysis of extracting relevant existing and new interaction patterns that are candidates as enabling paradigms to facilitate Internet of Thing user created application building. We first define the context and underline what is an internet of thing user created application and what are the main research issues. We stress the focus on Interaction design as a must have paradigm to reach the Internet of thing user created application vision and highlight the research scope. In this paper we contribute with a template based interaction pattern that refers to competitive advantages and limitations with regard to our vision. The research method allowed us to sort out our first library of interaction pattern in this field. We conclude the paper with lab experimentation and lessons learned.