Work packages

WP1- Requirements, architecture and impact

WP1 will elaborate a common vision and context for the project, sharpen its focus, furnish the architectural foundation, and study its impact on organizations.

WP1 will achieve its objectives by undertaking four main activities. First, WP1 will capture and analyze domain and user requirements to understand the motivation, interests, priorities and abilities of various actors and players, establishing a context and reference for the design and development of technical solutions. Requirements elicitation will be based on stakeholder identification, scenario development, and use-case studies, all with special attention for well-being and well-working. Second, WP1 will develop an overall architecture. This architecture provides a high level specification of person-centric reasoning and adaptive privacy components and functions, in accordance with the user and domain requirements. Results obtained in this activity are important to align and coordinate technical work in different work packages. Third, WP1 will conduct user studies in order to uncover potential hurdles and provide insights regarding the motivation and expectations of users with respect to 'intelligent' technology support for work and well-being. And fourth, WP1 will consider the intelligent workplace architectures and solutions against the background of a disruptively evolving societal and business context. This activity will develop ways to model, monitor and evaluate effects of information technology on the way people and businesses organize and experience work.

WP2- Person centric reasoning for physical well-being

This work package focuses on person reasoning for physical well-being. The general objective of this work package is to devise a person-centric solution for knowledge workers with chronic conditions - like elderly people - based on miniaturized wireless inertial sensors, which provide distributed motion caption and intelligent recognition of activities and situations.

The results of this work package enables the recognition of patient condition in real-time, by exploiting the processing power of the sensor network in a collaborative manner. This means that patients can receive real-time feedback in order to monitor, self-manage and improve their physical condition according to their specific situation. Main challenges include the use of distributed, heterogeneous and incomplete sensor data to perform reliable and real-time reasoning in order to be able to give instantaneous and adequate feedback to the user.

The first task of this work package will design and develop distributed data processing, with the final goal of detecting reliably and in real-time the user condition, situation and activity. In addition, it explores how the system can adapt to the user specific conditions and learn about those situations that were not pre-programmed at development time.

The second task focuses on enhanced user interaction and real-time feedback, mainly using simple and ubiquitous interface devices will be preferred, such as the TV, lights, or frame displays.

WP3- Person centric reasoning for mental well-being

WP3 aims at developing person centric inferencing techniques with a focus on mental well-being  scenario. The core of this WP are two PhD projects that address two different determinants of well-being: ‘empowerment' and ‘workload management'.

Well-being and productivity of knowledge workers is a largely unexplored research area. Sensor based techniques for the recognition of human behaviour and state are developing rapidly. WP3 will create a link between the social sciences and sensor bases human activity recognition in order to support knowledge workers to improve their mental well-being.

The first task in this work package will focus on the development of unsupervised user centric inference techniques to determine in which work-context the user is working. The current work context can be estimated from local behavior and information access and production. These work-contexts can be used to guide resource discovery helping knowledge workers to avoid the duplication of work and optimize their planning. Additionally it can be used to find non-disturbing moments during the user's working day that can be used to provide tips and tricks to improve physical and mental well-being.

The second task will focus on the development of user centric inference techniques that reason about the actual and optimal workload of a knowledge worker. Using various types of sensors, a low level data stream will be interpreted in terms of task level actions, user goals and cognitive load. Proof-of-concept strategies will be developed and evaluated where the inferred information will be used to help the user to mitigate high workload situations.

Both tasks will start with capturing the datastreams of sensors and communication protocols and ground truth information that reflect the activity of a reasonable size of). Data will be cleaned and anonomized with the aim to share (part of the) data with the research community. The data will be used to train and evaluated the activity recognition models. Empowerment and workload controlling assistants (well-working e-coaches) will be based on inference techniques exploiting this data, potentially in the context of peer groups. E-coaches will be evaluated in cooperation with WP6.

WP4- Context aware adaptive privacy

The use of multi heterogeneous sensory devices gives rise to an increased information level about persons but also poses an increased privacy risk, especially when ubiquitous sensors and devices are networked and connected to on-line services. User awareness and control are essential for privacy preservation and ultimately for the acceptance of well-being and well-working services. It is therefore crucial that the user is in control of data collection, processing and distribution. Somehow the user should be empowered to control his/her privacy, e.g. by delegation, consent, policy management, or via existing user centric identity management solutions.

User privacy control however is not easy to achieve in ubiquitous environments. Privacy control must be user intuitive and non-intrusive, i.e. it must be adaptive to changing contexts. Context aware adaptive privacy exploits the ability to sense and use contextual information to augment or replace traditional user privacy control mechanisms by making them more flexible, intuitive and less intrusive. The objective of WP3 therefore is to research and implement personalized, adaptive, and non-intrusive privacy control through reasoning. In particular, WP4 researches and demonstrates how the end-user controls the gathering, processing and distribution of information. The underlying mechanism is based on policies that allow the user to express what information sharing is allowed. The policies are personal and adaptive to the user's preferences. It is essential that the user is able to set information sharing policies in an intuitive and simple way, i.e. that he/she is in control. This work package elaborates and specifies reasoning algorithms from WP2 and WP3 and uses user interaction results from WP5 and WP6 to optimize intuitiveness of non-intrusiveness of privacy controls. WP5 and/or6 will integrate and demonstrate the technologies developed in WP4.

WP5- Well-being applications for physical lifestyle changes

WP5 studies intervention strategies that support users to live a healthier, more active lifestyle. A key objective is to identify effective feedback strategies and incorporate these strategies into technology-mediated behavior change applications. The target group concerns people who benefit from a more active lifestyle; this includes both healthy individuals and people with a chronic condition.

WP5 will construct, demonstrate and evaluate well-being applications that incorporate results from user-studies and technological results from WP2. A key requirement for these applications is that they are person-centric (i.e. easy to experience, and designed around the end-user) while the underlying technology delivers an advanced experience. These applications will be validated in field studies. Components of the well-being applications will be demonstrated as part of the SWELL "golden demo".

WP6- Well-being applications for mental lifestyle changes

The main objective of this WP is to improve the effectiveness and flexibility of (nomadic) workers by developing methods, an integrated infrastructure, and applications to facilitate personalized access to relevant context information of themselves, co-workers and work activities. We focus on providing and effectively presenting all sorts of context information to a (nomadic) worker to enable to become and stay ‘in sync' and ‘in touch' with co-workers and their work activities. This deals with developing a context management architecture that is suitable to support various user centric and intelligent well-working scenarios. Additionally, pre- and post-processing of context and work related information to facilitate such scenarios is a focal point.

The increased variance in work setting with respect to place, time and collaboration activity makes nomadic work becoming more and more important. Therefore better information management and context-rich information handling strategies are required to support workers in this kind of work setting to prevent them from stress.

To realize our objective, we design, integrate, demonstrate, and validate the added value of the functionalities provided by the UCR4W reasoning (WP2) and privacy components (WP3) for applications supporting well-working (mobile office) scenarios (WP1). This work package builds an integrated intelligent workplace system that maintains a personal semantic profile of the worker's context and activities (both current and historic), investigates and implements user interaction strategies; researches designs, and demonstrates and evaluates a well-working mobile application through pilots performed with real users in every day life. The system will be demonstrated as a "golden demo", which is developed in several iterations.