From Smart Home to Smart Space in Independent Living: A Framework for Multiple Contexts Management

During this last decade we have seen that the most suitable application of smart homes targeted independent living of people with disabilities and elderly people. We have seen the emergence of different smart homes prototype developed by several research projects in Europe, North America and Asia. This concept of smart home in a box, which is mainly technology push driven, have two weak points: at first end-users were generally not involved, not user pull driven, and secondly, the smartness of the living environment was limited to the indoor box, even if some remote access functionalities where designed, as soon as the user leaves the box he loose all of the available smartness. In this paper, we describe our research strategy on how to provide a suitable living environment for dependent people based on a push-pull approach. The idea is to focus on the user and provide him the mean to bring part of the home smartness outside in order to interact with unknown environments, as such the bus/train station, the shopping mall, the hospital, and so on. The goal of this research work is not to develop a product, but mainly to focus on a generic framework for service continuity taking into account the user, the environments, and the mobility aspects within known and unknown environments. The ultimate goal is not only to ensure of a coherent matching between the user requirements and the available services, but also the way to interact that we described as human-environment interaction (HEI).