Sensory Augmented Computing and its Potential for Human-Computer Interaction

The vision of ambient intelligence is to embed computing and communication capabilities into nearly everything, namely the environment, objects, or even clothing. Even though there have been great advances in mobile computing and communication in general many important research issues remain. A particularly challenging research topic is the question of how to interact unobtrusively and in a seamless way with users in a mobile setting. In order to realize the vision of ambient intelligence context awareness is often seen as a means to make the computing tasks sensitive to the situation and the user's needs. Ultimately, context awareness may support and enable seamless interaction and communication between human users and pervasive computing environments. This paper gives a taxonomy and an overview of research in sensing for ambient intelligence. It also discusses open and fundamental challenges which need to be addressed.