Everywhere & Nowhere

Ambient intelligence is designed to shape our lives, without us really noticing it

You walk into your office in the morning. Sensing it’s you, the office seemingly springs to life, adjusting the temperature and lights to your preferred settings and playing the calming music you like in the mornings.

After a long day, you seek refuge in your study at home, and the same thing happens. The room knows what you need and snaps to it, without you having to lift a finger. You settle into your favorite chair, knowing your bedroom is preparing for you to visit there next.

Those are just some of the amenities possible with ambient intelligence, and a big reason why the smart home and office are poised to become so much smarter.

The key features of ambient intelligence will include ubiquity – it will be everywhere, in every part of the home or office. Yet, you won’t really notice it because another key feature will be its invisibility. It will be working in the background, becoming more efficient and less noticeable as it learns its owner’s tendencies. It will be proactive, responding instantly when someone enters the room rather than requiring someone to flip a switch.

It will remove friction from tech and completely change how people interact with devices. As such, its use cases will extend far beyond a nice cozy room.

How It’ll Work

All that sounds like an extension of the IoT, which it is in a way, but ambient intelligence goes beyond that to incorporate AI, machine learning, and edge computing. Advanced sensors will allow IoT devices to communicate with each other in more sophisticated ways, tailoring an environment specifically to someone’s comfort.

“For example, your smartwatch might inform your thermostat when you’re approaching home, prompting it to adjust the temperature to your preference,” custom software developer Eastgate Software declares.

Just as a smart thermostat can learn when someone is usually home or in the office and adjust the temperature a few minutes before it expects that person to arrive, the machine learning components can analyze more precise data picked up by the sensors to trigger actuators to adjust the temperature when they sense the motion or noise of someone entering the room. The more the ambient intelligence system learns, the better it can refine its operations to anticipate needs and spring into action with no direct human input.

Putting It to Work

With such capabilities and user-centric design, ambient intelligence can easily lower energy costs in homes and offices. The promise of such precise coordination offers exciting possibilities beyond creature comforts.

In healthcare, advanced sensors enable caregivers to monitor patients remotely in real time and send alerts when abnormalities crop up.

“There are so many patient stories that I have of patients who are being remotely monitored with a blood pressure unit who maybe over the span of two days had an extremely elevated blood pressure and they ended up getting a phone call from their doctor. The doctor told them to go to the ER. The ER diagnosed them, and all of a sudden they were getting a stent put in and it saved their life,” Lindsay Dymowski, co-founder and president of Centennial Pharmacy Services, told BOSS.

In the transportation sector, equipping individual vehicles with ambient intelligence can optimize routes, saving time and fuel. On a larger scale, public traffic systems can communicate more quickly to coordinate traffic lights to minimize congestion.

Miami-Dade County Department of Transportation and Public Works officials are installing what will eventually be 3,000 smart signals powered by Remix, with the aim of reducing commute times by 15%.

“The goal is always to try to have at least four or five straight green lights per trip. We want to stretch that out to eight or nine so that people reduce their commute times,” signal chief Frank Aira told the Doral Family Journal.

In retail, sensor-equipped shelves can monitor inventory levels, reporting on their own when they need to be restocked. Monitoring customer behavior with AI and computer vision from specialists like StrataVision can enhance decision-making, boost operational efficiency, and elevate customer experiences with accuracy and speed.

As you might expect, such pervasive and yet invisible technology can be quite expensive in its infancy, and the more connected devices we have, the more ways bad actors find to hack into networks. Security and privacy standards need to be robust. But ambient intelligence will change the role of technology in our lives, and it won’t stay in the background for long.