C. Using cooperative artefacts as basis for activity recognition.pdf

Using Cooperative Artefacts as Basis for Activity Recognition Martin Strohbach, Gerd Kortuem, Hans-Werner Gellersen, Christian Kray Computing Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR {strohbach, kortuem, hwg, kray}@comp.lancs.ac.uk Abstract. Ambient intelligent applications require applications to recognise user activity calmly in the background, typically by instrumentation of environments. In contrast, we propose the concept of Cooperative Artefacts (CAs) to instrument single artefacts that cooperate with each other to acquire knowledge about their situation in the world. CAs do not rely on external infrastructure as they implement their architectural components, i.e. perceptual intelligence, domain knowledge and a rule-based inference engine, on embedded devices. We describe the design and implementation of the CA concept on an embedded systems platform and present a case study that demonstrates the potential of the CA approach for activity recognition. In the case study we track surface-based activity of users by augmenting a table and household goods. 1 Introduction Ambient Intelligence research aims to create environments that support the needs of people with ‘calm’ technology. [4, 31]. To this effect many ambient intelligence systems make use of knowledge about activities occurring in the physical environment to adapt their behaviour. Hence, one of the central research challenges of ambient intelligence research is how such systems acquire, maintain, and use models of their changing environment. Approaches to address this challenge are generally based on instrumentation of devices, physical artefacts or entire environments. Specifically, instrumentation of otherwise non-computational artefacts has been shown to play an important role, e.g. for tracking of valuable goods [9, 18, 26], detecting safety critical situations [28], or supporting human memory [17]. In most augmented artefact applications artefacts are instrument