Learned in Smart Environments Engineering

During the last few years we have developed different smart environments and artifacts by creating devices or extending existing ones to make them smart. In this paper we will show some of the projects developed at the Telekooperation Group. Throughout those examples we show how we have been developing ubiquitous computing aplications by empowering users with new interactions means and extending devices and services to make them smart. We also provide an overview of a middleware and software tools that implement different abstractions required to building a vision were ubiquitous applicacions can be developed in a more efficient and scalable way. Finally, we summarize our experience building smart environments with both top-down and botton-up approaches, presenting the different issues we encountered with the hardware, the software design and development, and the user interaction.