Goals & Topics

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has emerged as one important application of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) due to the severe demographical and social changes facing industrialized countries. The vision of AAL is to provide technologies for supporting (elderly) people in their daily lives, allowing them to grow old in their own homes. AAL should therefore provide equipment and automated services that enable senior citizens to stay in their own homes longer, living independent and self-determined lives and thus avoiding the move to a nursing home. A suitable AAL system should allow people to interact with it in a natural and personalized way, taking into consideration their specific interests, needs, and abilities as well as disabilities. They should also be enabled to perform their tasks, e.g., checking their vital data or controlling the home security system, by using any device available in the system (which may vary dynamically at runtime). A User Interface (UI) in AAL should therefore be multimodal, adaptive, and more importantly, usable. Hence, IUI can be appropriate for AAL. The challenging task of designing such UIs is the motivation for this workshop.

This workshop will thus offer the opportunity for researchers in the fields of AmI technology, cognitive psychology, (intelligent) user interface design, and context awareness to discuss the state of the art in each field with regard to the specificities of AAL. The main goal, however, should be the setup of an international research community for IUI4AAL, and the formulation of a corresponding research and cooperation agenda.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Acceptance studies for adaptive UI, for example on the way people perceive and accept adaptable UIs.
• Modality selection and combination approaches, for example determining suitable interaction modalities for the elderly and the criteria used to select and combine/integrate them.
• UI design patterns / guidelines / concepts / architectures.
• Approaches for intelligent user interfaces for life-long learning.
• Mobile User Interfaces to address AAL everywhere (indoor / outdoor).
• Approaches for determining the usability of integrated devices/systems, stating, for example, how the usability of the whole system depends on the subsystems/devices.
• Models and technologies for (dis)ability recognition, allowing, for instance, adapting the UI to the individual needs at runtime.