Building a Sensory Infrastructure to Support Interaction and Monitoring in Ambient Intelligence Environments

In the context of Ambient Intelligence (AmI), the elaboration of new interaction techniques is becoming the most prominent key to a more natural and intuitive interaction with everyday things [2]. Natural interaction between people and technology can be defined in terms of experience: people naturally communicate through gestures, expressions, movements. To this end, people should be able to interact with technology as they are used to interact with the real world in everyday life [19]. Additionally, AmI systems must be sensitive, responsive, and adaptive to the presence of people [16]. This paper presents the design and implementation of an interaction framework for ambient intelligence targeting to the provision of novel interaction metaphors and techniques in the context of AmI scenarios. The aforementioned infrastructure has been deployed in vitro within the AmI classroom simulation space of the FORTH-ICS AmI research facility and used to extend existing applications offered by an augmented interactive table for young children (Beantable) to support also games that facilitate biometric information, rich interaction metaphors and speech input [20].