A framework for human interaction with mobiquitous services in a smart environment

Mobiquitous is a term recently introduced in literature to stress the strategic convergence of mobile and ubiquitous technologies. Mobiquitous services in a smart environment rely on the capability of smart objects to sense, compute, communicate and take some adaptive actions according to their goals in situated contexts, even without the human intervention. These complexity oriented issues make the human interaction with mobiquitous services more crucial and more challenging as compared with the classical human–computer interaction. In this paper, we propose a general framework as a conceptual tool for modeling such an interaction, once specific technologies are selected and employed. We view a single interaction occurring in a smart environment as a sequence of actions that involve users, mobiquitous services, interaction resources, environmental context items, and information exchanges between the user and the mobiquitous service. We specify these concepts and we discuss their interrelationships. The rationale is to provide a conceptual aide for designing, analyzing and operationalizing human interaction with mobiquitous services and applications in smart environments.