Ambient kitchen: designing situated services using a high fidelity prototyping environment

ABSTRACT

The Ambient Kitchen is a high fidelity prototype for exploring the design of pervasive computing algorithms and applications for everyday environments. The environment integrates data projectors, cameras, RFID tags and readers, object mounted accelerometers, and under-floor pressure sensing using a combination of wired and wireless networks. The Ambient Kitchen is a lab-based replication of a real kitchen where careful design has hidden the additional technology, and allows both the evaluation of pervasive computing prototypes and the simultaneous capture of the multiple synchronized streams of sensor data. Previous work exploring the requirements for situated support for people with cognitive impairments motivated the design of the physical and technical infrastructure and we describe both our motivations and previous work on interaction design in kitchen environments. Finally, we describe how our lab-based prototype has been put to use as: a design tool for designers; a design tool for users; an observatory to collect sensor data for activity recognition algorithm development, and an evaluation test bed. The limitations and advantages of lab-based, as opposed to in situ home-based testing, are discussed

References

1. Wherton, J. P, and Monk, A. F. (2008) Technological opportunities for supporting people with dementia who are living at home, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 66, Issue 8, August 2008, Pages 571--586.
2. Friedman, R. H. (1998). Automated telephone conversation to assess health behavior and deliver behavioral interventions. Journal of Medical Systems 22:95--101.Hersh & Treadgold, 1994
3. Kirsch, N. L. (1992) Computer-assisted interactive task guidance: Facilitating the performance of a simulated vocational task. Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, 7(3): 17--25.
4. Kim, H-J, Burke, D. T., Dowds Jr, M. M., Robinson Boone, K. A. & Park, G. J. (2004). Electronic memory aids for outpatient brain injury: follow-up findings. Journal Brain Injury, January, 14:2:187--196.
5. Nadler, J. D., Richardson, E. D., Malloy, P. F., Marran, M. E., & Hosteller Brinson, M. E. (1993). The ability of the dementia rating scale to predict everyday functioning. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 8(5), 449--460.
6. Boyle, P. A., Paul, R. H., Moser, D. J., & Cohen, R. A. (2004). Executive Impairments Predict Functional Declines in Vascular Dementia. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 18(1), 75--82.
7. Baruch, J., Downs, M., Baldwin, C., & Bruce, E. (2004). A case study in the use of technology to reassure and support a person with dementia. Dementia, 3(3), 371--392.
8. Kautz, H., Fox., D., Etzioni, O., Borriella, G. and Arnstein, L. 2000. An Overview of the Assisted Cognition project. Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Automation as Caregiver: The role of intelligent technology in elder care, 60--65. Edmonton, AB.
9. Mihaildis, A., Barbenel, J. C., & Fernie, G. (2004). The Efficacy of an intelligent cognitive orthosis to facilitate hand-washing by persons with moderate to sever dementia. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 14(1/2), 135--171.
10. Hoey, J., von Bertoldi, A., Poupart, P. & Mihailidis, A. (2007). Assisting Persons with Dementia during Handwashing Using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Vision Systems (ICVS), Biefeld, Germany.
11. Dishman, E. (2004). Inventing Wellness Systems for Aging in Place. Computer, 37(5), 34--41.
12. Tran, Q. T., Calcaterra, G., & Mynatt, E. D. (2005) Cooks collage: Dééjà vu display for a home kitchen: Proceedings of HOIT '05 conference on home-oriented informatics and telematics, 15--32, York, UK.
13. Morady, K. and Humphreys, G. W. (2009) Comparing action disorganization syndrome and dual-task load on normal performance in everyday action tasks. Neurocase 15 (1) 1--12.
14. Weiser, M., The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American, 1991. 265(3): p. 93--104.
15. Bonanni, L., Lee, C. H., Selker, T. (2005a), CounterIntelligence: Augmented Reality Kitchen, in Proc. CHI '05 pp. 2239--45
16. Bonanni, L., C.-H. Lee, and T. Selker (2005b) Attention-based design of augmented reality interfaces. In CHI '05: CHI'05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 1228--1231, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ACM Press.
17. Chang, K-H, S.-Y. Liu, H.-H. Chu, J. Hsu, C. Chen, T.-Y. Lin, and P. Huang (2006), Dietary-aware dining table: Observing dietary behaviors over tabletop surface. In Pervasive Computing, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference, PERVASIVE 2006, pages 366--382, London, UK, 2006. Springer-Verlag
18. Hybridmedia as a tool to deliver personalised product-specific information about food. Report of the TIVIK project. Järvinen, T. (eds.); Södergård, C; Lähteenmäki, L., Juurikko, S., Kallio, M., Kuosmanen, J., Laarni, J., Ottelin, A-M. (2005). VTT Information Technology, Espoo. 34p. VTT Tiedotteita - Research Notes: 2304.
19. Ju, W., R. Hurwitz, T. Judd, and B. Lee (2001), Counteractive: an interactive cookbook for the kitchen counter. In CHI '01: extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 269--270, New York, NY, USA, 2001. ACM Press.
20. Siio, I., N. Mima, I. Frank, T. Ono, and H. Weintraub (2004) Making recipes in the kitchen of the future. In CHI '04: CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 1554--1554, New York, NY, USA, 2004. ACM Press.

Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Computers in other domains

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Computer vision

      • Computer vision problems

        • Video segmentation

      • Computer vision tasks

        • Video summarization

      • Image and video acquisition

• Information systems

  • Information systems applications