Services Everywhere: an Object-Oriented Distributed Platform to Support Pervasive Access to HW and SW Objects in Ambient Intelligence Environments

The Ubiquitous Computing concept was first defined by Mark Weiser (Weiser, 1995) and it refers to a new computing era where electronic devices merge with the background. People make use of those electronic devices unconsciously, focusing just on their needs and not in how to accomplish them. The concept of Ambient Intelligence (Ducatel et al., 2001), lying on the ubiquitous computing paradigm, refers to those environments where people are surrounded by all kind of intelligent intuitive devices, capable of recognising and responding to their changing needs. People perceive the surroundings as a service provider that satisfies their needs or inquiries in a seamless, unobstrusive and invisible way. It is generally agreed that AmI (Ambient Intelligence) will have a great impact in economy and society. The potential of AmI technologies in various application areas has been object of numerous studies. For example, the IPTS/ESTO Ambient Intelligence in Everyday Life Roadmap (Friedewald & Da Costa, 2003) report analyzes key application areas in order to find out which are the technological requirements that must support the functions that will make the difference in each of those application areas (housing, mobility and transport, shopping and commerce, education and learning, health, culture, leisure and entertainment). But AmI is not only its technological facet. There is also a social and a politics dimension besides the devices and software upon which the intelligent environments are built. Technology must be helpfull, work with users and not against them trying to pull down the wall of the natual resistance of the human being to revolutionary changes.