Technological Innovation for Collective Awareness Systems

Abstract

Automation systems are inseparable part of everyday life; heating systems, ticket vending machines or blood glucose meters are few examples of such systems, showing the diversity of their application domain. This diversity implies the variety of different user groups with assorted capabilities interacting with such systems in different contexts. Hence, the requirements of the human-machine interfaces of such systems are strongly varying, depending on the context of use. Attempts in developing high interactive systems, such as user centered development or universal design have failed; either they are costly or system specific. Furthermore, many context-relevant aspects are only known at run-time. In this paper, we propose a generic concept, which adapts the human-machine interfaces of automation systems at run-time, according to the context of use. It addresses not only the representational aspects but also the semantics and the connection to the underlying technical system. The concept is implemented as an evaluating prototype. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.