Ambient intelligence

Abstract

In this article we survey ambient intelligence (AmI), including its applications, some of the technologies it uses, and its social and ethical implications. The applications include AmI at home, care of the elderly, healthcare, commerce, and business, recommender systems, museums and tourist scenarios, and group decision making. Among technologies, we focus on ambient data management and artificial intelligence; for example planning, learning, event-condition-action rules, temporal reasoning, and agent-oriented technologies. The survey is not intended to be exhaustive, but to convey a broad range of applications, technologies, and technical, social, and ethical challenges.

eFRIEND: an ethical framework for intelligent environments development

“…There have been several discussions and surveys of the technology behind intelligent environments and ubiquitous computing (Chan el at, 2009;Cook et al, 2009;Wright et al, 2010;Sadri, 2011). The diverse range of applications in this field has been well documented and their many potential benefits acknowledged.…”

“…Privacy is perhaps the single area of greatest concern in intelligent environments and the most frequently cited ethical issue in the literature surveyed (Aarts, 2004;Bohn et al, 2004;Brey, 2005;Van Heerde, 2006, Brown andAdams, 2007;Albrechtslund, 2007;Chan et al, 2009;Oishi et al, 2010;Sadri, 2011;Caire et al, 2014). Privacy concerns are acknowledged as one of the major inhibitors to the adoption and implementation of smart homes, for example, due to concerns around potential breaches of privacy when devices in the home reveal more information than an individual desires.…”

“…The opening up of the home by information-generating, permanently-networked technologies has brought with it new surveillance issues for architectural design according to Albrechtslund (2007, p.14), an example being smart systems that monitor household utilities consumption remotely, and that mine data from usage logs. The possibility of monitoring and recording activity in other domains such as retail, shopping, transport, also bring privacy risks (Sadri, 2011). Similarly, context-aware, location-based mobile computing can disclose behaviour and social phenomena such as a user's location, their friends and associates, the timings of interactions, and data accessed.…”

“…Following on from privacy concerns, a number of authors have highlighted various data protection issues around the storage, retention and disclosure of personal data, the access to, and secondary uses of, such data by key stakeholders and third parties, and the risks of accidental or intentional leaking of sensitive data (Price et al 2005;Sadri, 2011). Related issues have been raised around confidentiality, trust and informed consent by both Sliwa and Benoist (2011) and by Wright et al (2010).…”

A review of smart homes in healthcare

“…There exist some research surveys devoted to SHs and ambient intelligence [2,21,99]. The present survey goes beyond these by (1) presenting the state of art studies at all levels: hardware, networking, knowledge engineering and reasoning, human-computer interface; (2) focusing as much as possible on studies related to healthcare; and (3) ensuring an up-to-date and full coverage of techniques, technologies and methods.…”