Development and Deployment of Interactive Pervasive Applications for Ambient Intelligent Environments

Abstract

Bringing together heterogeneous computing devices and appliances gives rise to a pervasive environment where resources interact with each other, such as a mobile phone telling the car’s stereo to mute. Applications deployed in such an environment should be sufficiently dynamic to cope with new configurations.This goes beyond building context-aware applications that assume a fixed environment as there is no guarantee the configuration does not evolve, making the software developed for the initial situation deprecated. We present models and frameworks that support the development and deployment of pervasive applications that allow the environment configuration to change over time. Computer-augmented resources also tend to become physically simpler to use (e.g. less buttons) but become more complex to handle in their digital dimension (e.g. overloaded user interfaces). As a consequence, the behaviour of the pervasive applications leveraging these resources gets even more complex to understand and configure. This demands for tools that help developers and end-users inspect and manipulate the current state of the pervasive computing environment. We present tools that can be used to observe applications at runtime, by means of the messages they exchange, the events they generate and the behaviour they define. Moreover, efficient discovery of nearby devices and accessible services is one of the preconditions to obtain a usable pervasive environment. Typical user interfaces in these environments hide the heterogeneity of the environment for the end-user which often makes it hard to perceive the provided functionality. We present meta-user interfaces as a means for exploring and controlling the environment. Furthermore, we offer user-oriented views on the user’s environment based on pictures of this environment. We show how users can model, explore and finally interact with complex pervasive environments using migratable (photo-based) user interfaces.