Building An Intuitive Multimodal Interface For A Smart Home

This book describes an innovative approach to the interaction between humans and a smart environment; an attempt to get a smart home to understand intuitive, multi-modal, human-centred communication. State of the art smart homes, like other “smart” technology, tend to demand that the human user must adapt herself to the needs of the system. The hunt for a truly user-centred, truly intuitive system has long proven to be beyond the grasp of current technology. When humans speak with one another, we are multimodal. Our speech is supplemented with gestures, which serve as a parallel stream of information, reinforcing the meaning of our words. Drawing on well-established protocols in engineering and psychology, and with no small amount of inspiration from a particular nonsense poem, we have successfully concluded that hunt. This book describes the efforts, undertaken over several years, to design, implement, and test a model of interaction that allows untrained individuals to intuitively control a complex series of networked and embedded systems. The theoretical concepts are supported by a series of experimental studies, showing the advantages of the novel approach, and pointing towards future work that would facilitate the deployment of this concept in the real world.

Advances in Ubiquitous Computing: Cyber-Physical Systems, Smart Cities and Ecological Monitoring debuts some of the newest methods and approaches to multimodal user-interface design, safety compliance, formal code verification and deployment requirements, as they pertain to cyber-physical systems, smart homes and smart cities, and biodiversity monitoring. In this anthology, the authors assiduously examine a panoply of topics related to wireless sensor networks. These topics include interacting with smart-home appliances and biomedical devices, designing multilingual speech recognition systems that are robust to vehicular, mechanical and other noises common to large metropolises, and an examination of new methods of speaker recognition to control for the emotion-state of the speaker, which can easily impede speaker verification over a wireless medium. This volume recognizes that any discussion of pervasive computing in smart cities must not end there, as the perilous effects of climate change proves that our lives are not circumscribed by the geographically sculpted boundaries of cities, counties, countries, or continents. Contributors address present and emerging technologies of scalable biodiversity monitoring: pest control, disease transmission, environmental monitoring, and habitat preservation. The need to collect, store, process, and interpret vast amounts of data originating from sources spread over large areas and for prolonged periods of time requires immediate data storage and processing, reliable networking, and solid communication infrastructure, along with intelligent data analysis and interpretation methods that can resolve contradictions and uncertainty in the data—all of which can be bolstered by modern advances in ubiquitous computing. Examines the history, scope and advances in ubiquitous computing, including threats to wildlife, tracking of disease, smart cities and Wireless Sensor Networks Discusses user interface design, implementation and deployment of cyber-physical systems, such as wireless sensor networks, Internet of Things devices, and other networks of physical devices that have computational capabilities and reporting devices Covers the need for improved data sharing networks

Mixed Reality has been part of our lives ever since we first started to dream of creative ways to comprehend information and concepts through actual and imaginative experiences. This book explores the latest research informing education design in virtual and augmented reality. By utilising numerous studies and examples, it describes the differences between perceived knowledge, usage area, technologies, and tools. It will help the reader gain a better understanding of the nature of virtual or augmented realities and their applications in theory and practice.

This book presents the latest research advancements in the operation of smart homes. It comprises new operation techniques including cooperative distributed energy scheduling, framework to react to malicious cyberattacks, framework for demand-side management, and framework for the design of smart homes to support residents’ wellness as well as new optimization techniques such as stochastic model predictive control and multi-time scale optimization. In addition, the book analyzes 11,000 studies that have been indexed in scientific databases and categorizes them based on various data points, including the field and the subject of the research, the name of the institutions, and the nationality of the authors. Presents new operation techniques of smart homes; Introduces new optimization techniques for operation of smart homes; Analyses 11,000 studies and categorizes them based on different data points.

The “smart mobile” has become an essential and inseparable part of our lives. This powerful tool enables us to perform multi-tasks in different modalities of voice, text, gesture, etc. The user plays an important role in the mode of operation, so multimodal interaction provides the user with new complex multiple modalities of interfacing with a system, such as speech, touch, type and more. The book will discuss the new world of mobile multimodality, focusing on innovative technologies and design which create a state-of-the-art user interface. It will examine the practical challenges entailed in meeting commercial deployment goals, and offer new approaches to the designing such interfaces. A multimodal interface for mobile devices requires the integration of several recognition technologies together with sophisticated user interface and distinct tools for input and output of data. The book will address the challenge of designing devices in a synergetic fashion which does not burden the user or to create a technological overload.

The field of assistive technology is influenced by the ongoing and rapid development of mainstream technologies on the one hand and continuing changes to social systems in relation to societal events - such as the ageing of the population - on the other. The articles in this book provide a broad overview of developments in technical support for people with functional restrictions: key technologies like telecommunications and IT are addressed, while low-tech practical solutions are also considered.

The three-volume set CCIS 1419, CCIS 1420, and CCIS 1421 contains the extended abstracts of the posters presented during the 23rd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2021, which was held virtually in July 2021. The total of 1276 papers and 241 posters included in the 39 HCII 2021 proceedings volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 5222 submissions. The posters presented in these three volumes are organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: ​HCI theory and methods; perceptual, cognitive and psychophisiological aspects of interaction; designing for children; designing for older people; design case studies; dimensions of user experience; information, language, culture and media. Part II: ​interaction methods and techniques; eye-tracking and facial expressions recognition; human-robot interaction; virtual, augmented and mixed reality; security and privacy issues in HCI; AI and machine learning in HCI. Part III: ​interacting and learning; interacting and playing; interacting and driving; digital wellbeing, eHealth and mHealth; interacting and shopping; HCI, safety and sustainability; HCI in the time of pandemic.

We are living in a world full of innovations for the elderly and people with special needs to use smart assistive technologies and smart homes to more easily perform activities of daily living, to continue in social participation, to engage in entertainment and leisure activities, and to enjoy living independently. These innovations are inspired by new technologies leveraging all aspects of ambient and pervasive intel- gence with related theories, technologies, methods, applications, and services on ub- uitous, pervasive, AmI, universal, mobile, embedded, wearable, augmented, invisible, hidden, context-aware, calm, amorphous, sentient, proactive, post–PC, everyday, autonomic computing from the engineering, business and organizational perspectives. In the field of smart homes and health telematics, significant research is underway to enable aging and disabled people to use smart assistive technologies and smart homes to foster independent living and to offer them an enhanced quality of life. A smart home is a vision of the future where computers and computing devices will be available naturally and unobtrusively anywhere, anytime, and by different means in our daily living, working, learning, business, and infotainment environments. Such a vision opens tremendous opportunities for numerous novel services/applications that are more immersive, more intelligent, and more interactive in both real and cyber spaces.