Embedding Self-Awareness into Objects of Daily Life -- The Smart Kettle

Intelligent Environments on varying scales and for different purposes are slowly becoming a reality. In the near future, global smart world infrastructures will become a commodity that will support various activities of daily life at different degrees of realism. Such infrastructures have the potential to offer dedicated, context- and situation-aware information and services by simultaneously providing the next-generation of data collection, execution and service provisioning layers. One key aspect of this vision is the correct monitoring and understanding of how people interact with their environment; how they can actually benefit from the added intelligence; and finally how future services can be improved or better personalized to enhance human environment interaction as a whole. This level of intelligence is of particular relevance in the health and social care domain where person-centric services can be deployed to assist or even enable a person in performing activities of daily living. This paper discusses the concept of embedded self-aware profiles for smart devices that can be used to gain a deeper contextual understanding of their use and also discusses the emergence of a general model of Ambient Intelligence that is based on the collective existence and behavior of such smart devices. Although generic in principle, the proposed concepts have been exemplified by a distinct use case, namely a smart kettle.