| Abstract |
By now, the number of the smartphones in use is estimated to billions, being an integral acquisition of a large part of the population and the everyday life. Meanwhile, mobile phones have evolved rapidly both from software and hardware aspect. In this way, each user carries a potential means that can provide a great range of capabilities if utilised properly. Meanwhile, the concept of Ambient Intelligence involves the exploitation of every resource, technical or not, to improve the user experience of interplaying with an “intelligent” environment.
This thesis will focus on the convergence of the world of smartphones with that of ambient intelligence. Great benefits can be induced through the utilization of smartphone capabilities as a means of controlling a smart environment or as the medium for the environment to “sense” user status and intentions.
The creation of a toolkit is proposed to handle the reciprocal communication between the smartphones and the Ambient Intelligence Environments. It is a multiplatform application targeting most of the modern mobile operating systems. It is used to expose the smartphone data and capabilities into the Ambient Intelligence Environment, based on a Service Oriented Architecture.
The feature list of the toolkit was designed to fulfill requirements set by the different research fields currently active in Ambient Intelligence. The context aware systems are benefited by the complete list of exposed sensors which includes inertial, geo-location and environmental sensors. Moreover, device data are extracted such as the profile and lock status, the charging state and currently selected operation language. Gesture-based systems are handled by 7 supported gesture recognizers having as input the physical movements of the mobile device into 3D space. In parallel, the NFC support will come to elevate the touch-less interaction with the environment. The list of features is completed by the support of the direct access to the file system of the smartphone.
Two projects were implemented using the proposed toolkit. SmartCube is a custom Smart Object to control Smart Home appliances. Moreover, the “A day at work” scenario explored the smartphone integration into office environments.
An evaluation study was conducted with 11 participants to assess the gesture recognition rates and the user experience in gesture-based systems through smartphone. The results were encouraging since most of the participants considered such an interaction method as useful and easy to use.
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Smartphone exploitation in Ambient Intelligence Environments
