An approach towards personalized user interfaces for ambient intelligent home environments

Today´s consumer devices are equipped with an enormous number of functions controllable by the user. Therefore, an efficient menu structure is of high interest. Nowadays each device uses its own user interface along with appropriate menu structures. As a result, different devices from different vendors are typically equipped with diverse menu structures and layouts even if they actually have similar functionalities. Thus, the user is typically confronted with inhomogeneous menu structures forcing one to learn the logic behind each structure first, before an efficient interaction with the interface is possible. This paper discusses a novel approach of interaction-structure generation, which represents the first results of our work done within the user interaction oriented task of the EU-IST funded research project Amigo. Further, this work is also based on results we gained out of our inHaus-project. In this work we present an innovative concept for a personalized graphical user interface for AmI (Aml=ambient intelligence) home environments. Functionalities of different devices and software components are bound into one operation concept to give the user the feeling of interacting with one solid system and not with a loosely coupled set of single devices. Therefore, the binding between device and functionality has been removed and device independent menu structures have been introduced. Links between devices and functionalities are only maintained for the sake of execution. The core idea of the presented approach is to automatically provide a consistent interface throughout different environments. This is reached by adapting structure and presentation to personal user preferences. These adaptations help the user to operate unknown AmI environments efficiently and as intuitively as possible