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Extending In-Home User and Context Models to Provide Ubiquitous Adaptive Support Outside the Home

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User Modeling and Adaptation for Daily Routines

Abstract

Ubiquitous Computing has proved to be an excellent way of providing technological support for the daily life of people within its range. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), which is largely based on Ubiquitous Computing, aims at tutoring and supervising elderly people and users with physical, sensory or cognitive disabilities in the performance of routine household activities. AAL’s main aim is to increase the autonomy of dependent people in their daily life by providing them with supportive instructions for everyday routines and warnings about home safety issues. This concept can be extended to public spaces, where ubiquitous accessible services allow people with disabilities to access location-dependent web services (providing maps, addresses, transport schedules, etc.) and local intelligent machines (such as information kiosks or ATMs). This approach allows existing knowledge about the users, their common activities, and their environment to be used to extend the in-home AAL concept to the support of common routines performed outside the home. This chapter surveys the modelling techniques used inside the home and discusses the methodologies required for their extension for out-of-home use, including interoperation and sharing of models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Interoperability requirements are essential because Ubiquitous Computing involves a large diversity of hardware and software, which implies dealing with different combinations of devices, protocols and services. It cannot be forgotten that interoperability failures typically lead to problems that users will not be able to solve [31].

  2. 2.

    Many European projects in the area of supportive intelligent environments have adopted URC/UCH (Universal Remote Console/Universal Control Hub), which is an ISO standard that acts as a middleware for ubiquitous interaction: Universal Control Hub 1.0 (DRAFT), http://myurc.org/TR/uch

  3. 3.

    For instance, Taher et al. [54] propose an indoor wayfinding support system that includes using personal mobile phones.

  4. 4.

    For more information about indoor location systems the Survey of Indoor Positioning Systems by Gu et al. [25] can be consulted.

  5. 5.

    More information about outdoor people location technologies can be found in the book “Location-based Services: Fundamentals and Operation” by Küpper [38].

  6. 6.

    http://www.hitech-projects.com/euprojects/amigo/

  7. 7.

    http://www.easylineplus.com/

  8. 8.

    http://www.vaalid-project.org/

  9. 9.

    http://www.dfki.de/senshome/

  10. 10.

    http://www.soprano-ip.org/

  11. 11.

    http://openaal.org/

  12. 12.

    The seminal paper [35] can be consulted for a deeper insight into the User Modelling. In this paper Kobsa describes the purposes of generic user modelling systems, their services within user-adaptive systems, and the different design requirements. Brusilovsky provides details on the application of user modelling to adaptive hypermedia in another influential paper [7].

  13. 13.

    http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu

  14. 14.

    “Personas are not real people, but they represent them throughout the design process. They are hypothetical archetypes of actual users” [15].

  15. 15.

    http://www.i2home.org/

  16. 16.

    http://www.etsi.org

  17. 17.

    http://www.who.int/classiffications/icf/en/

  18. 18.

    Common Accessibility Profile is the basis of the ISO/IEC 24756:2009, http://www.iso.org/

  19. 19.

    Paternó presents the main concepts underlying task models and discusses how they can be represented and used for designing, analyzing and evaluating interactive software applications [50].

  20. 20.

    ANSI/CEA-2018 (American National Standards Institute/Consumer Electronics Association) defines an XML-based language for task model descriptions. http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/model-based-ui/wiki/ANSI/CEA-2018

  21. 21.

    For more details about context modeling, the paper from Bettini et al. [6] discusses and compares the requirements that context modelling and reasoning techniques should meet.

  22. 22.

    AAL Open Association http://www.aaloa.org/

  23. 23.

    UniversAAL, UNIVERsal open platform and reference Specification for Ambient Assisted Living http://www.universaal.org/

  24. 24.

    Sus-IT project. Using ITs for a better and more independent future. http://sus-it-plone.lboro.ac.uk/

  25. 25.

    INREDIS project: INterfaces for RElations between Environment and people with DISabilities. http://www.inredis.es/Default.aspx

  26. 26.

    For instance, CC/PP is a RDF-based data exchange language that allows representing information about the user’s device. http://www.w3.org/TR/CCPP-struct-vocab/

  27. 27.

    FOAF: Friend of a Friend vocabulary specification 0.91 2007. http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/20071002.html

  28. 28.

    Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C Recommendation, 10 Feb 2004. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfconcepts/

  29. 29.

    Web Ontology Language (OWL) ‐ W3C Recommendation, 10 Feb 2004. http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/

  30. 30.

    OpenCyc ontology, http://www.opencyc.org/

  31. 31.

    MILO (Mid-level Ontology), http://sigmakee.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/sigmakee/KBs/Mid-level-ontology.kif

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Acknowledgments

This research work has been partly funded by the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government. In addition, A. Aizpurua, B. Gamecho and R. Miñón enjoy PhD scholarships from the Research Staff Training Programme of the Department of Education, Universities and Research of the Basque Government.

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Aizpurua, A. et al. (2013). Extending In-Home User and Context Models to Provide Ubiquitous Adaptive Support Outside the Home. In: Martín, E., Haya, P., Carro, R. (eds) User Modeling and Adaptation for Daily Routines. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4778-7_2

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