Simplifying Human to Environment Interaction through Touch Computing
Diego López–de–Ipiña, Juan Ignacio Vázquez · 2008
Abstract. This work analyses the use of NFC technology to simplify the interactions of users with context-aware services offered by intelligent environments. Touch Computing is a novel explicit user interaction mechanism in which users accompanied by their NFC-enabled mobile devices request services from the environment by touching tags or other NFC-enabled devices. This paper describes the deployment of three NFC-aware services within SmartLab, our AmI-dedicated lab, and the user experience derived from them. Moreover, it analyses the possibilities offered by the current state of the art on NFC and suggests some future lines of work, which may revert into its more widespread deployment in the near future. Keywords. AmI, human-environment interaction, NFC, Internet-of-Thing. 1. Introduction The promotion of natural user interaction to access surrounding intelligent services is one of the main goals of Ambient Intelligence. Using the current context of a user (location, identity or current action) as implicit input and voice commands or movement (i.e. natural interaction) as explicit input, an AmI environment adapts to the user preferences and habits. As a result of these implicit or explicit inputs, the environment reconfigures and changes its behaviour by triggering and activating services which aid users in their daily activities. Besides, AmI environments undertake these adaptations without the users being aware of the underlying sensing and computing infrastructure which makes it possible. An interesting technology which has emerged in the last year and which seems as an ideal candidate to help on providing a more natural way of interaction between the user and the environment is Near-Field-Communication (NFC). This technology is a combination of contact-less identification and interconnection technologies that enables wireless short-range communication between mobile devices, consumer electronics, PCs and smart objects. NFC offers a simple, touch-based solution that allows consumers to exchange information and to access content and services in an intuitive way. Thus, the emergence of NFC should simplify human to environment interaction, giving place to the Touch Computing paradigm, where users have only to wave their representing mobile devices in front of everyday objects augmented with RFID tags and visual markers or other NFC-aware devices in order to trigger the intelligent services offered by them. In fact, the combination of RFID and visual tagging of