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AmbienNet environment has been developed with the aim of demonstrating the feasibility of accessible intelligent environments designed to support people with disabilities and older persons living independently. Its main purpose is to examine in depth the advantages and disadvantages of pervasive supporting systems based on the paradigm of Ambient Intelligence for people with sensory, physical or cognitive limitations. Hence diverse supporting technologies and applications have been designed in order to test their accessibility, ease of use and validity. This paper presents the architecture of AmbienNet intelligent environment and an intelligent application to support indoors navigation for smart wheelchairs designed for validation purposes.

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AmbienNet is an ongoing project aiming to demonstrate the viability of accessible intelligent environments to support people with disabilities and elderly people living autonomously. Based on the Ambient Intelligence paradigm, it tries to study in depth its advantages and disadvantages for people with sensory, physical or cognitive restrictions. To this end diverse supporting technologies and applications have been designed, in order to test their accessibility, usability and validity. After introducing the objectives and findings of the project, in this paper a number of preliminary results are presented and discussed.

This chapter introduces the main trends in the design of interfaces for smart wheelchairs. It stresses the importance of taking into account their similarity with autonomous mobile robots and the restrictions posed by the special characteristics of the users (people with severe motor and speech restrictions) and the task (indoor assisted navigation). With this background, the main features of the user-wheelchair interface are discussed, justifying the need for the adoption of an adaptive approach. The TetraNauta smart wheelchair interface design is used to illustrate the design of user, context, and task models. In addition, it describes some mechanisms to enhance the communication rate when a single-switch-scanning input device is used (scanning rate dynamic adaptation and word prediction). The chapter finishes with a discussion of the influence of new navigation models, such as the behaviour-based one, in the design of the user interface.