Smart Living: Ubiquitous Services Powered by Ambient Intelligence (AmI)

Optoelectronics and computing industry has made significant advances in data acquisition and communication for ubiquitous availability. As a result data-intelligence is readily available to users through Wi-Fi enabled smart devices. Internet access to information, services and all-time availability are the features making smart communities and shaping lifestyles in emerging smart world. IoT and IoE have become buzz words of the ICT industry. Those add and couple intelligence with smart interfaces and sensors with ubiquitous services. Autonomous activities range from sensing, logging to expert systems for alarm generation and decision making. These technologies coupled with knowledge management and support systems based on service oriented architectures (SOA) in the cloud domain, has led to a paradigm shift and rethinking of human machine interface. The perception of computing devices is vanishing behind the interfaces offered by smart hand-held devices. Ambient intelligence is the next generation of the smart solutions. Where the data collected by devices is used by an inference engine for taking autonomous decisions. Some of the areas where AmI has been successfully used are: eLearning, assisted-living, traffic management, eHealthcare and emergency handling etc. Paper presents examples of the smart solutions for ubiquitous computing and communications used for assisted-living, eHealthcare, Education and Surveillance systems. Various enabling technologies for ambient intelligence have been discussed, while identifying the challenges e.g. ethical issues, security and forensic analysis and so on.