The Smart Furniture project [3] aims at developing hardware infrastructures, a middleware technology and applications for ubiquitous computing. In ubiquitous computing environment, various devices and sensors are distributed to the environment and connected each other. They provide various software services to users and devices which enable context awareness, device coordination and personalization. Smart Furnitures are the hardware platforms for embedding such devices in our daily life.
Many researchers [1] [2] [4] introduced infrastructures to realize Smart Space. In many cases, special rooms equipped with sensors, embedded devices and computers are used to detect human activity and provide services. We also built Smart Space Laboratory(SSLab.) [6] as a room which is equipped with sensors, embedded devices and computers. However, the cost and time for building such a smart room is a barrier to the deployment of the ubiquitous computing environment. This project, instead, aims to extend non-smart space to have smart functionality by simply putting "Smart Furniture" in place.
In this section, the physical structure and middleware for the Smart Furniture are described. We also present several applications on Smart Furniture.