Abstract
Analysis of currently dominating and emerging use cases provide extremely valuable information for understanding of the key drivers of a technology development. In this chapter, the authors particularly focus on introducing and making an overview of the emerging case studies on top of the ambient intelligence technology. They discuss several case studies that illustrate opportunities and design details for development of highly personalized smart services. The chapter provides definition of the key enablers of the service smartness (e.g., location-awareness, design principles, and restrictions, etc.). The discussion on provided definitions and presented enablers is supported by a few use case examples in the field of e-tourism and e-healthcare. In addition, the chapter introduces the general principles of ZeroUI concept and role of virtual and augmented reality in delivering the new user experience. The chapter is targeted to clearly ground the book scope to the real-life use cases and most relevant trends.
TopBackground
The general principles of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) were introduced 20 years ago and thanks to development of supporting technologies like IoT, now we witness transformation of AmI into a huge industry. Current estimates suggest that by 2020 the number of IoT devices will be over 26 billion units worldwide and the ambient applications will generate more than 8 billion downloads in applications such as personal assistants, social communication, health and fitness, augmented reality and local search applications. Generally AmI transforms the environment into more friendly space where intelligent information processing happens on the edge of the environment and the computational ability is seamlessly injected into all aspects of daily life of the user.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Virtual Reality (VR): An interactive computer-generated experience taking place within a simulated environment that incorporates auditory, visual, and sensory feedback and enables full freedom of operations in the virtual world.
E-Healthcare (E-Health): A healthcare practice supported by electronic processes and communication.
Augmented Reality (AR): An interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects that reside in the real-world are “augmented” by computer-generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory, and olfactory.
ZeroUI: A paradigm where user’s movements, voice, glances, and even thoughts can cause systems to respond by adopting environment to increase comfort of the user.
Use Case: Describes how a user uses a system to accomplish a particular goal. The use case is made up of a set of possible sequences of interactions between systems and users in a particular environment and related to a particular goal.
E-Tourism: The analysis, design, implementation and application of IT and e-commerce solutions in the travel and tourism industry; as well as the analysis of the respective economic processes and market structures and customer relationship management.