Towards Integration of User Interaction and Context Event Processing in Intelligent Living Environments

Event processing plays a significant role in the current development of intelligent living environments. It ranges from processing of information produced by a magnitude of sensors to gain insight into the activities of the inhabitants on a more global scale, to the processing of immediate and rather short-lived events of user input on and around interactive systems embedded in common household furniture like tabletops or tablets. Based on the work conducted separately in those two fields, we found that the still evolving field of complex event processing (CEP) provides the methods and tools to handle those distinct use-cases equally. Especially the application to interactive systems, while being novel and uncommon, is well suited and further shows the broad applicability of CEP. The comparison of the two application fields shows that, even though the events occurring in them are distinguished by their intention, commonalities do exist and provide integration points. Furthermore, the integration of those applications within the context of smart homes allows to provide demand-oriented resource management, which realizes self adaptation and control.