Ambient intelligence for supporting task continuity across multiple devices and implementation languages

Nowadays users are surrounded by environments characterized by an abundance of devices and appliances that they use for carrying out their everyday activities. In order to improve user experience, the surrounding environments should be intelligent enough to allow users to freely move around and be able to perform their tasks in a continuous manner, without forcing them to start their interactive session from scratch at each device change. In this paper, we present an agent-based solution able to support migration of interactive applications among various devices, including digital TVs and mobile devices, and therefore useful for users freely moving about in the home and outdoor. The aim is to provide users with a seamless and supportive environment for ubiquitous access in multi-device contexts of use. The proposed open architecture for migratory user interfaces (UIs) is composed of several agents. It exploits their functionalities and is able to automatically build logical descriptions of existing interactiveWeb applications and then dynamically generate UIs that are adapted to various types of target devices and implementation languages, including non-Web languages, with the state updated to the point at which it was left off in the previous device.