The Family Intercom: Developing a Context-Aware Audio Communication System

We have begun an exploration of how ubiquitous computing technology can facilitate different forms of audio communication within a family. We are interested in both intraand inter-home communication. Though much technology exists to support this human-human communication, none of them make effective use of the context of the communication partners. In the Aware Home Research Initiative, we are exploring how to augment a domestic environment with knowledge of the location and activities of its occupants. The Family Intercom project is trying to explore how this context can be used to create a variety of lightweight communication opportunities between collocated and remote family members. It is particularly important that context about the status of the callee be communicated to the caller, so that the appropriate social protocol for continuing a conversation can be performed by the caller. In this paper, we will discuss our initial prototypes to develop a testbed for exploring these context-aware audio communication services.