In this paper, we describe the development of a hand held personal home assistent capable of controlling a wide range of electronic home devices. A demonstrator of the system was developed in the European project TIDE HEPHAISTOS (Home Environment Private Help AssISTant fOr elderly and diSabled). Its multimodal user interface is based on a coloured high resolution touch screen extended with spee...

This paper describes the development of novel user interface concepts for an in-home environment. If interaction devices at various places in a house are interconnected through an in-home network, people are no longer restricted to a location where a device with a particular functionality is located. Instead, they are even able to start an activity (such as watching a movie or making a videopho...

Passive smoking means cigarette smoke inhaling by people other than smokers. Passive smoker inhales tobacco smoke coming not only from side-stream, but also smoke exhaled by the smoker. Long-term tobacco smoke inhaling increases the risk of appearance of smoke related diseases (for example COPD, heart diseases), including the most dangerous types of cancer, which only few smokers realize. The a...

The BASIS project is about the secure application of transparent biometrics in the home environment. Due to transparency and home-setting requirements there is variance in appearance of the subject. An other problem which needs attention is the extraction of features. The quality of the extracted features is not only depending on the proper preprocessing of the input data but also on the suitab...

Textile controls so far, have mostly been envisioned to be integrated to clothing. In our environment, however, much more textile interaction surfaces are available. In this paper, we present a capacitive textile sensor, seamlessly integrated into a motorized curtain. While the basic functionality is simply to open and close the curtain, its design allows a much richer gestural interaction.

The goal of the MavHome (Managing An Intelligent Versatile Home) project is to create a home that acts as an intelligent agent. In this paper, we introduce the MavHome architecture and two learning algorithms that play central roles in the smart home. The first algorithm predicts actions the inhabitant will take in the home. The second algorithm learns a policy to control the home. Effectivenes...

Nowadays, systems are growing in power and in access to more resources and services. This situation makes it necessary to provide user-centered systems that act as intelligent assistants. These systems should be able to interact in a natural way with human users and the environment and also be able to take into account user goals and environment information and changes. In this paper, we presen...

The distributed object group framework (DOGF) enables easier integration of distributed objects to healthcare home applications. This paper describes a healthcare information management system for supporting healthcare home services based on DOGF. The system architecture consists of healthcare database management tool, framework, sensor manager and physical elements such as sensors, devices and...