AMIGO
Ambient Intelligence for the Networked Home Environment

The Amigo Project was transferred to the Fraunhofer institute SIT and is no longer being worked on at AMBIENTE.

Amigo is an Integrated Project (IP) funded by the European Commission in the Sixth Framework Programme. It started on September 1, 2004 and has a duration of 3,5 years until February 28, 2008.

Goal

The goal of the Amigo-project is to research and develop open, standardized, interoperable middleware and intelligent user services for the networked home environment, which offers users intuitive, personalized and unobtrusive interaction by providing seamless interoperability of services and applications.

Motivation

Traditionally home automation, consumer electronics, mobile
communications and personal computing were strictly separate domains all having their own industrial players, standardization efforts and form factors.By introducing the networked home, the traditional separation of activities is no longer valid. This networked home environment leads to many new opportunities. The most important one is Ambient Intelligence with the complete integration of technology into our environment so people can freely and interactively use it. However, general end-user acceptance of home networking is not yet in place. To get broad user acceptance and fast market introduction attractive, easy to use services must be present which clearly offer an advantage over what is offered today. Many of these new services will use context and user information in a way that is not possible in present non-networked systems. Within the Amigo project these services are called intelligent user services as they make the system 'intelligent' from the end-user perspective.

Amigo will focus on different scenarios in three application domains: Home Care and Safety, Home Information and Entertainment, Extended Home Environment. For all three domains, Amigo will develop "Intelligent User Services" that are based on an Open Middleware for the Networked Home.

Role of Fraunhofer IPSI

Fraunhofer IPSI is a major partner in the Amigo project. The work is especially carried out in the AMBIENTE division. We are especially active in the work packages addressing the user requirements, intelligent user services, home information and entertainment, extended home environments. Our previous work on Ambient intelligence and ubiquitous computing in smart environments (e.g. Ambient Agoras, hybrid games or other projects) forms a well-developed basis to engage in the Amigo IP.

Partners

The project consortium has 15 partners from industry, research labs, universities and SMEs from 7 European countries and is coordinated by Philips. Fraunhofer is participating with two institutes (IPSI, IMS). Other major partners are France Telecom, Microsoft, INRIA, VTT, Telefonica.
The complete list and additional information can be obtained from the project website www.amigo-project.org