Creation and Visualization of User Behavior in Ambient Intelligent Environment

Ambient intelligence is a rapidly developing field producing a new generation of applications and services demanding new, more complex strategies for usability testing and evaluation. In this paper, we identify caveats of traditional methods of application usability testing when applied to an ambient intelligent environment and we introduce a method for unified analysis of user behavior using a virtual environment visualization. For the usability testing in ambient environments, we propose to transform data (both data recorded in real settings and data artificially created by experts) into a virtual environment to cope with the following issues: a) overwhelming amount of data, b) proprietary data formats, and c) ethical codices issues. We describe a tool for creation of expert evaluation data and for transformation of data from video recordings and illustrate its use on two cases.