Interaction Zone between an office worker

Various kinds of groupware tools support remote workers to share information, documentation or planning between them. However, due to difficulties for them to share their awareness of a distant workplace, a new framework is required to take care of each remote worker's office in order to make it more effective, efficient thus productive. In this paper, we propose a concept of an Interaction Zone (IZ) between a remote worker and a Personal Assistant (PA) which is an agent program watching over each remote worker using sensors deployed in a ubiquitous office. The PA understands worker's behavior through signals from the IZ. It is prototyped using the OMAS platform to aim at enhancing a relation between a worker at office and his own PA by verbal interface and non-verbal interface which are realized in the proposed IZ.