Positive Technology Journal

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) will radically change how people interact with technology. In AmI, people will be surrounded by a multitude of interconnected embedded systems. These devices will be able to locate and recognize objects and people, as well as people’s intentions. The term “intelligence” in this regard refers to the fact that the digital environment is able to analyze the context, adapt itself to the people and objects that reside in it, learn from their behavior, and eventually recognize as well as express emotion. According to this vision, people will not just use technology: they will live with it. This system requires a clear understanding of user’s experience and methods to be used for its evaluation. However, the concept of people’s experience is a complex one.

In the chapter that I have recently published in the book "Ambient Intelligence", I present a framework to evaluate user’s experience in AmI systems that stresses the role of attention in actively selecting information from the digital environment. Being a limited resource, attention forces the individual to focus on a restricted number of environmental or internal stimuli per time unit. Therefore, each individual effectively perceives only a small part of the available information. This form of psychological selection is driven a positive, complex and rewarding state of consciousness, called flow, or optimal experience. Starting from these premises, in the second part of the chapter I explain how optimal user experience in AmI systems may be assessed. In particular, I describe the Experience Sampling Method, a procedure that has been effectively used in various applied research domains.