Smart Products: Integration Challenges

Smart Products (SPs) are elements for building ambient intelligent environments. AmI is considered to be a merger of Ubiquitous Computing (UC) with Social User Interfaces and refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people [1]. Many visions of UC have already come to reality: Computers are "everywhere" and we have reached an n-to-1 relationship between computing devices and people. Devices are getting cheaper, become easier to use, and wireless network interfaces enable communications. However, the "smartness", such as autonomic behavior, personalization and cooperation capabilities of these devices is still rather limited. Compared to the notion of appliances investigated in UC twenty years ago, which has brought several important base technologies, Smart Products aim to add such smart behavior.