A Personal Smart Space approach to realising Ambient Ecologies

One of the main aims of research in the area of ubiquitous or pervasive computing is that of dealing with the rapidly growing number of sensors, devices and artefacts in the user’s environment, which have an increasing amount of intelligence built in and which can communicate via wireless technologies. To assist in this the concept of Ambient Ecologies has been proposed as a metaphor for modelling ubiquitous or pervasive applications based on fixed smart spaces, such as the Smart Home. This paper describes the notion of a Personal Smart Space (PSS) and how it can be used to realise Ambient Ecologies. It goes on to show how, using a PSS approach, one can handle more general situations in which an Ambient Ecology is formed dynamically when two or more PSSs come together wherever this may be. The idea of a PSS is fundamental to the prototype pervasive system that has been developed within the Persist project where it has been used to demonstrate a range of different pervasive applications. In particular this prototype has been used to demonstrate a futuristic situation in the smart home where the total environment is under user control. It is shown how the requisite Ambient Ecologies can be handled by PSSs. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the Persist prototype in which mobile PSSs are used to affect the behaviour of fixed PSSs in their environment.