Aware homes

The movie Kitchen Stories (2003), set in rural Norway in the 1950s, portrays a Swedish researcher sitting on a raised chair in the kitchen of a farmer, observing how the space and appliances are used.1 The observer has a map on which he records all the movements and activities of the homeowner. The final goal of this ethnographic study is to collect enough observations to deduce how kitchens are used in practice and what can be improved in the design of the next generation of Swedish furniture. The movie, which builds on the tension between the observer and the observed, carries an interesting idea from industrial design: the user and the usage should be the driver for creating ergonomic spaces, and usage is best observed in situ. The idea is still pursued today, with the advantage that we are able to observe unobtrusively and automatically. Sensors and communication technologies allow us to automate data acquisition, while making it more reliable and information-rich. At the same time, we gain the possibility of real-time adaptation of the environment to the needs of the inhabitant. A number of sensors are able to measure physical quantities and can be used to infer information about the user and the home situation. The context of the home is its state at any given moment. The context includes facts about the users (location and activity currently being carried out), the appliances (refrigerator temperature and content, instantaneous electricity consumption of any device connected to a socket), the spaces (room temperature, status of heaters and coolers, status of doors and windows in terms of being open, closed or locked) and the home situation (weather information, cost of electricity on the grid). A modern home can in this way be aware of its state and that of its inhabitants. But moving from simple sensor reading to complex contextual information, such as inhabitant activity, is still a challenge. Huebscher and McCann (2004) proposed context-aware middleware to support access to home context information.2 Contextual information is central to the creation of an architecture for a smart home. The initial state of the home and of its inhabitants is fundamental for the system to decide how to actuate/operate/act/execute in the home and, in turn, satisfy the needs of the user. But context alone makes the home aware, not Figure 1. A visualization of the smart home used in the Smart Homes for All project, created for simulation purposes.