Interaction Zone between an office worker
Kenji Sugawara, Yusuke Manabe, Shigeru Fujita, Salem Ben Yaala · 2011
Various kinds of groupware tools support remote workers to share information, documentation or planning between them. However, due to difficulties for them to share their awareness of a distant workplace, a new framework is required to take care of each remote worker's office in order to make it more effective, efficient thus productive. In this paper, we propose a concept of an Interaction Zone (IZ) between a remote worker and a Personal Assistant (PA) which is an agent program watching over each remote worker using sensors deployed in a ubiquitous office. The PA understands worker's behavior through signals from the IZ. It is prototyped using the OMAS platform to aim at enhancing a relation between a worker at office and his own PA by verbal interface and non-verbal interface which are realized in the proposed IZ.