At MIT, a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from the House_n Consortium is studying how to create ubiquitous computing environments for the home. We are developing technologies and design strategies that use context-aware sensing to empower people with information by presenting it in timely, tailored ways via home and mobile computing devices. Contrary to many visions of future home environments in the literature, we advocate an approach that uses technology to incrementally teach as opposed to using technology primarily for automated control. I will outline our general approach and then describe several ongoing projects designed to use sensor technology to either measure or motivate health-related behavior change.

     Stephen Intille is Technology Director of the House_n Consortium based in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. His research interests are focused on the development of context-recognition algorithms and interface design strategies for ubiquitous computing environments. Of special focus is the challenge of creating spaces and devices that motivate behavior change over long periods of time, particularly as applied to preventative health care. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1999 working on computational vision at the MIT Media Laboratory, an S.M. from MIT in 1994, and a B.S.E. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He has published research on large-occlusion computational stereo depth recovery, multi-agent tracking, real-time tracking, multi-agent action recognition, perceptually-based interactive environments, and health technologies.