ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT Ambient intelligence (AmI) is a key enabling technology of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems. One of the specified objectives of AAL is to improve social interaction and minimize isolation of individuals with their communities. This calls for the design of AAL systems with the primary goal of assisting people in their interaction with others in their daily environments. In addition, whether or not an AAL system is intended for promoting social interaction, it must intelligently and naturally support its human users, who by nature are social beings. This necessitates the need for social context awareness by these systems to adapt and respond to the changing social context of the users. In this chapter, we first discuss the emerging concept of social ambient intelligence (socAmI). We then review the underlying methods and technologies to address three important challenges of socAmI: the acquisition of social context, enhancing ubiquitous social networking, and privacy protection.
