www.ausmt.org 93 auSMT Vol. 1 No.1 (2011) Copyright © 2011 International Journal of Automation and Smart Technology ORIGINAL ARTICLE AICASN: Ambient Intelligence, Context Awareness, and Sensor Networks Taiwan Perspective: Developing Smart Living Technology Chih-Kung Lee 1, 2, 3, *, Julie Lee 4 , Po-Wen Lo 1 , Hsiao-Lin Tang 5 , Wen-Hsin Hsiao 1 , Jui-Yao Liu 1 , and Ting-Li Lin 6 1 Institute of Applied Mechanics, National Taiwan University, Taiwan 2 Eng. Science & Ocean Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taiwan 3 Institute for Information Industry (III), Taiwan 4 AHEAD Optoelectronics, Inc., Taiwan 5 Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan 6 Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan (Received 4 January 2010; Accepted 25 May 2011; Published on line 1 September 2011) *Corresponding author: cklee@ntumems.net DOI: 10.5875/ausmt.v1i1.74 Abstract: The pursuit of Smart Living Technology is a recent trend in which technology is applied to daily life to increase efficiency, affordability and sustainability. The principle behind Smart Living Technology is that technology should be used to advance the needs of human beings and to increase the quality of life by the power of human creativity while at the same time sustaining the environment for future generations. As such, intelligent networks should be adopted to provide humans with full information to control an individual’s personal environment. Wireless technology can play a key role in enabling smart energy monitoring by allowing consumers to make more informed choices and to connect products and devices to a coordinated management system. The development of Smart Living Technology is based on the concept of user driven innovations. Various Living Labs have been established around the world as development centers for extension of this Smart Living Technology. In this paper, the background and current developments of Smart Living Technology are reviewed, followed by real examples taking place in Taiwan. Finally, the focus and future plan for Taiwan are discussed including a strategy for further development of Smart Living Technology in Taiwan. Keywords: Smart Living Technology; Information Communication Technology (ICT); smart home. Introduction In the past ten years since the establishment of the internet era, sites like Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have created communities of connected users. Through these communities, many innovative human minds have evolved into collaborative intelligence. At a Web 2.0 Summit 2009, Tim O'Reilly predicted that the next five years would be web squared when “the Web meets World”. That is, Web 2.0 technologies are now interacting with the real world through the use of sensors [1]. He believes that collective intelligence applications will be increasingly driven by cascades of sensor data or information given off by devices. For example, smart phones today have built-in cameras, microphones, and sensors which provide information on the motion, proximity, location, and direction of the user. These sensors are equivalent to our human senses such as sight, hearing and touch. By connecting these senses to cloud computing databases and programs running on massive server farms, it is possible to create a smart living environment for humans. Since Taiwan is well-known for its information and communications technology, Taiwan is facing the “web squared challenge” by focusing on developing Smart Living Technology.