On computational modeling of human-oriented knowledge in Ambient Intelligence

Recent developments within Ambient Intelligence (AmI) provide new possibilities to contribute to personal care, e.g. [1,2,6,7]. For example, our car may monitor us and warn us when we are falling asleep while driving. Similarly, the workspace of a technical worker may monitor the person’s stress level, and provide support in case it is too high. As another example, an elderly person may wear a device that monitors his or her well-being and generates an action when a dangerous situation is noticed. While such AmI applications can be initially based on the acquisition and fusion of sensory information, more intelligent applications need to depend on the availability of an adequate knowledge base for the analysis of human functioning. In recent years, scientific areas such as cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience and biomedical sciences have made substantial progress in providing increased insight in the physical and mental aspects of human functioning. Although much work still remains to be done, models have been developed for a variety of such aspects and the way in which humans (try to) manage or regulate them. From a biomedical angle, examples of such aspects are (management of) heart functioning, diabetes, and eating regulation disorders. From a psychological and social angle, examples are emotion regulation, attention regulation, addiction management, trust management, stress management, and criminal behavior management. If models of human processes and their management are represented in a formal and computational format, and incorporated in intelligent agents in the human environment [5], then AmI applications are able to perform a more in-depth analysis of the human’s functioning [4]. By endowing devices in the environment with explicit knowledge about humanoriented processes and with the capability to reason about the dynamics of such processes, an environment is created that has a better understanding of humans and how to support them, and is able to show a form of ‘social intelligence’ [3].