VECIMS 2007 – IEEE International Conference on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces, and Measurement Systems Ostuni – Italy , 25-27 June 2007 HI 3 Project: Design and Implementation of the Lower Level Layers G. Varela, A. Paz-López, S. Vázquez-Rodríguez, R. J. Duro Integrated Group for Engineering Research Universidade da Coruña Spain Abstract –We are interested in the development of human- centered and ubiquitous technologies in social environments. In this line, and in the framework of a global software architecture (HI 3 ) for this type of applications, the paper is devoted to the presentation of the work carried out for the design and implementation of the layer that is more closely linked to the hardware. It is in charge of communicating with the physical layer and it is responsible for the abstraction of the field elements. Special attention has been paid to the coherence with the philosophy, design premises and functionalities of the whole system. We have also determined a hardware configuration that, integrating standards where possible, is better adapted to the requirements of the architecture. The elements introduced here were validated on a real implementation of the system. Keywords – Ambient Intelligence, ubiquitous computing, distributed sensing/actuation. I. INTRODUCTION There are currently many hardware and software technologies competing for the domestic and social market. Each one of them tries to provide optimal solutions for its portion of the market. The user is immersed in a technological world that requires ever increasing participation, knowledge and training in order to benefit from it. Some visionaries imagined a very different scenario [1] in which technology, present in every aspect of life, would be designed in order to serve the individual who would be able to extract maximum performance from it in a natural and intuitive manner. Currently there are many research groups working on this idea, which has been called pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing or ambience intelligence. Some researchers work from a global perspective, as in the case of the Oxygen project at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory [2][3]. It enables pervasive, human-centered computing through a combination of specific system and user technologies that directly address human needs. In the Ambient project, at IPSI: Institut Integrierte Publikations und Informationssysteme [4], efforts are concentrated on the design of artifacts that, integrated in the working environment, permit new ways of interacting with the environment. In other cases, such as the Aware Home Project at the Georgia Institute of Technology or the Intelligent Inhabited Environments Group at the University of Essex, research is constrained to domestic environments [7]. A special mention must be made of those projects for improving health or personal assistance aimed at people with special needs, such as the Proactive Health Research Project, which is a collaborative effort between Intel and researchers at a number of universities. We are interested in the development of human-centered and ubiquitous technologies in social environments. The environment for a person must be understood as an extended environment. In it the person works, has its family life, its recreational time and its social life. Therefore this environment involves the workplace, the home, car, or public places such as malls or sports centers, among others. Some research groups have created experimental environments in which to try out new human-centered interaction technologies, such as the iRoom at Stanford University Computer Science Dpt. [8] or the Intelligent Room [9] at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Other projects like PRIMA, hosted by the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, concern technologies for the perception and recognition of human action for intelligent environments and man-machine interaction. The work presented in this paper was carried out in the framework of a broader multidisciplinary Project defined by our group and which we call HI 3 technology. Its main objective: to create Humanized, Intelligent, Interactive and Integrated environments. In a Humanized environment, people do not need to undergo training in order to make optimal use of technologies; they are transparent to the user. Consequently, to a large extent, the users are freed from their responsibility of explicitly interacting with technology. It is the environment the one that, in an active way, extracts information from the user and its context. An Intelligent environment must exhibit proactive, adaptive, predictive and autonomous behavior. It must be capable of learning from the use and habits of the users in order to predict and anticipate them. In this Interactive scenario, natural and intuitive interfaces must be developed for people to interact with each other and the environment itself. Finally, in an Integrated environment, the different technologies complement each other in a way that is transparent to the user. In addition, HI 3 technology must meet some design premises such as connectivity, determinism, fault tolerance, modularity, scalability, security, real time operation and ease of maintenance. To achieve all of this, the HI 3 software architecture has been conceived as a layered agent based architecture [2][3]. This favors better abstraction and distribution of the functionalities of the system and at the same time decreases the coupling between them.