Ambient multimodality: Towards advancing computer accessibility and assisted living

The aim of this paper is to point out the benefits that can be derived from research advances while implementing concepts such as ambient intelligence and ubiquitous/pervasive computing for promoting universal access in the information society, that is, for contributing to enable everybody, especially people with physical disabilities, to have easy access to all computing resources and information services that the upcoming worldwide information society will soon make available to the general public as well as to expert users. Following definitions of basic concepts relating to multimodal interaction, the significant contribution of multimodality to developing universal access is briefly discussed. Then, a short state of the art in ambient intelligence research is presented, including references to some major research projects either in progress or recently completed. The last section is devoted to bringing out the potential contribution of advances in ambient intelligence research and technology to the improvement of computer access for physically disabled people, hence, to the implementation of universal access. This claim is mainly supported by the following observations: (1) most projects are aiming at implementing ambient intelligence focus research efforts on the design of new interaction modalities and flexible/adaptive multimodal user interfaces; outcomes of these projects may contribute to improving computer access for users with physical disabilities; (2) such projects target applications meant to support users in a wide range of daily activities which will have to be performed simultaneously with the related supporting computing tasks; therefore, users will be placed in situational contexts where they will be confronted with similar difficulties to those encountered by physically disabled users, since they will have to share out their perceptual and motor capabilities between one or several daily activities and the computing tasks meant to support them; (3) ambient intelligence applications being intended for the general public, a wide range of interaction devices supporting a great variety of input and output modalities will be available, making it possible to provide physically disabled users with appropriate human-computer interaction means tailored to their individual needs at a reasonable expense. © Springer-Verlag 2006.