A framework for ambient applications

Applications are designed traditionally in a top-down manner, starting with explicit user requirements and requiring explicit user interaction to control them. Sensor networks provide a way for the autonomous acquisition of context information, which can be used to control applications without explicit user interaction. In addition, they can be used for context exploration. This enables a semi-automatic generation of new functionality. In this paper we introduce a framework for Ambient Applications (AmbientApps). AmbientApps are applications that can react to the context information with implicit user interaction. Besides providing the context information to AmbientApps, the framework is also characterized by its ability to detect new patterns in sensor data and link them to user actions on devices and pre-empting that user action the next time the same pattern is detected.