Services in AmI-NFC Environment

The Ambient Intelligence (AmI) concept has emerged to “describe interactions between a multitude of networkenabled devices, services and artifacts. The technology will be almost invisible, embedded in all kinds of objects and everyday environments, such as the home, office, car and train. Users’ access to applications and services – many of which will be delivered within mobile environments – will be simple and effortless” [1]. The origin of the AmI concept lies in the conjunction of Ubiquitous Computing, Ubiquitous Communications and Intelligent User Friendly Interfaces [2]; some of their many characteristics are as follows: context awareness, embedding device, an unobtrusive, proactive, implicit and natural interaction, access data and communications anywhere, etc. An AmI environment must be context awareness and sensor technology is the key for this. Radiofrequency identification (RFID) can be used to implicitly receive information about contextual information but it has two problems: the cost and the fact that it cannot pinpoint users (i.e. perceive users in an area). The new Near Field Communications (NFC) technology overcomes these problems and, although there are other problems (e.g. the antenna range), we considered this a sufficiently good option to explore its use in an AmI environment. The information necessary for the AmI environment using context awareness comes from two main elements: people (location and needs) and devices (location and services that are offered). Tagging users, places and devices enables a system to obtain sufficient data to be able to provide services to the user.