Interactive Multimedia Appliances

Institute for applied research in Visual Computing

© Fraunhofer IGD

Outline

An elderly woman is sitting comfortably in her living room and reading the newspaper. Slowly the room gets dark. With a slight movement, she points to her floor lamp and the light turns on. How does that work? The woman’s apartment has learned what she wants to say with this gesture. In the future, intelligent living environments such as this one could be part of our everyday lives.

The development of these future-oriented Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) solutions is the primary research area in our Interactive Multimedia Appliances competence center. Under the direction of Dr. Reiner Wichert, we are developing solutions that simplify living. They react independently and supportively to human needs and are invisibly integrated in the person’s daily life. In different projects, we are producing applications that, for example, adjust lighting and ventilation to the residents’ behavior, monitor health, and detect movements via sensors in the floor so that, for example, they can be helped if they fall. Wireless sensor networks are the key to success here. Our team is working on graphical tools with which these sensor tapes can be configured and monitored. This greatly simplifies living for the elderly, disabled people and others in need of care. The focus of our research activities is software development for controlling services in environments like these. We are available as an expert and technology partner in the following areas: ambient intelligence, ambient assisted living and user interaction in intelligent environments. We provide consulting and conceptual services.

The market potential of AAL developments is very great. Possible application areas are emergency care and health assistance, recreation, logistics, production, maintenance, transportation, office and home. In order for intelligent residential environments to be created and, more importantly, to function, all technical items must be equipped with uniform interfaces. Our department would be glad to develop the appropriate standards and solutions.

More information about this competence center can be found at
http://www-past.igd.fraunhofer.de/igd-a1/index.html

Business Fields

The Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) business unit
Due to the demographic shift, an ever greater percentage of the population considers that living and receiving care in their familiar home environment will be a more attractive alternative than moving into a nursing home. Despite the great future market potential of AAL for companies, the AAL industry is not about to take off. So, given these conditions, why hasn’t the somewhat sluggish AAL market started to move? By far the greatest market obstacle to widespread use of innovative assistance systems is, in almost everybody’s opinion, a lack of business models as a basis for cooperation between developers of information technologies, service providers, manufacturers of medical devices and the housing industry. Indeed for the past few years, AAL concepts have defined the scientific and market-oriented research landscapes. Unfortunately, however, it is foreseeable that these project results will not be used extensively because, as individual aapplications and products, they can only be linked to comprehensive solutions at a significant cost. Future AAL applications, however, must be flexible and expandable so that they can be adapted dynamically to personal needs and disease patterns. However, with the current closed system concepts, sensors and functionalities that are already in use by a given person will, in effect, have to be installed again and paid for again whenever a new functionality to be added cannot use them in their existent form. Therefore, platform concepts are required to lower the costs so that the costs can be borne by society.

That is why the Interactive Multimedia Appliance Competence Center is focused on AAL and AmI platforms on which additional components, such as sensors, services and devices, can be seamlessly integrated without any additional expense. For this purpose, the AAL lab has been designed as a small model apartment with floorspace of approx. 60 square meters and atypical division into entrance area, living room, bedroom and kitchen. It is equipped with such a platform as a reactive environment with a wide range of sensors, functions and possibilities for interaction. These are integrated into the apartment so that they can hardly be noticed (ambient) because this will be crucial for their success in the market later on.

Another area the Competence Center focuses on is that of developing interaction tools for intelligent environments. This has become necessary because reactive AmI environments often do not react the way the user wants them to, inasmuch as the user’s inclinations will change from time to time. Therefore, the user must have the option of intervening in a given action of the environment through interactions that are as natural as possible, such as particular movements or language, in order to change the environment’s behavior.