SmartSpaces

The SmartSpaces project at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley focuses on providing interactive, usable, and customizable support for individuals and groups within a sensor-rich environment. Building on previous work designed to simplify common business-related tasks such as making meeting arrangements and managing email, the project is a fusion of information and service configuration driven by location, preference, and task utilizing context-aware software agents, mobile appliances, robots, and agent mediated services. With research initiatives led by professors Martin Griss, Ed Katz, Patricia Collins, and Ray Bareiss, SmartSpaces is redefining assisted living for the 21st century.

SmartSpaces research focuses on two primary areas: elder care and home entertainment. In the area of elder care, SmartSpaces is investigating the use of sensor-enabled, multi-modal interactive systems in the home to assist the elderly with a variety of tasks such as medication management, shopping, and ordering food. Context-aware applications developed by SmartSpaces will not only afford the elderly a greater degree of independence and simplify daily living, but also help their caregivers provide better services by giving them the ability to remotely monitor the in-home activities of elderly clients and family members. On the home entertainment front, SmartSpaces is exploring the development of responsive, intelligent applications for managing and enhancing entertainment experiences for both individuals and groups. Actions such as proactive solicitation of programming preferences, automatic programming changes in response to the presence or absence of specific individuals, and censoring of inappropriate programming content in response to the detected presence of children are just a few of the myriad in-home entertainment uses envisioned for SmartSpaces by Griss and his research team. Other potential applications for SmartSpaces technology are also currently being explored, including GPS and personal travel assistants, meeting management for mobile professionals, and in-home location-aware robots such as vacuum cleaners.  

The SmartSpaces project makes extensive use of open source software in the development of context-aware agent-based applications and is closely affiliated with Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley’s Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI). Learn more by visiting the SmartSpaces website.

Contact: Martin Griss