Doorman

Doorman is a pervasive computing application, that serves people who visit or work in the office premises. It offers services concerning everyday communication and guidance situations.

Introduction

Doorman-system is build by Speech-based and Pervasive Interaction group. The development of the system started in a project called User Interfaces for Ubiquitous Computing (already ended). This project was funded by the Academy of Finland. Doorman is currently located in the premises of the University of Tampere in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences TAUCHI-unit.

Doorman project began to gain it's form in the beginning of the year 2000. The first prototype of the system will be ready and in use at the end of the summer 2002.

As part of the development process a Wizard of Oz experiment was carried out in the spring 2001. It is described in the following article:

Kaj Mäkelä, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Markku Turunen, Jaakko Hakulinen and Roope Raisamo. Conducting a Wizard of Oz Experiment on a Ubiquitous Computing System Doorman. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Information Presentation and Natural Multimodal Dialogue, Verona, December 14-15, 2001: 115 - 119.

Research Goals

The research goal of the system development is to consider the challenges, that will be faced when designing, developing and using pervasive computation and utilising environments that use speech and EMFi interfaces.

The primary goals of the research are the problems that relate to the interaction between the human and computer. Later other sociological and ethical goals may also be added to the research field.

Services

The purpose of the Doorman system is to offer a communication environment, that would be as intuitive and simple to use as possible. This is why the system will be made contextaware and adaptable. New interaction techniques are used. Primary interaction modality will be speech, but EMFi will also be used as weight sensors and speakers. Doorman is supposed to: - relieve staff from disturbing routine tasks, like opening the door and guiding the visitors. - to offer aid to the communication between the users (telephone calls, e-mail) despite their locations

Future Development

Various sensors offer data to Doorman so, that users do not need to participate in the data gathering process actively. The appearance of Doorman in everyday operating situations will be increased by placing EMFi sensors and speakers into the environment. With these devices more data of the users location can be gained and information can be offered despite the location of the user. Additionally the spatial data will also be gained by measuring the mouse and keyboard activity from the users desktop computers.

In the future, the spatial data gained by Doorman will reachable to other applications. These applications are for example message services, like SMS-message reading program (under development) and an speech synthesis utilising e-mail reading program called Mailman. A new message module is also under development. It will allow visitors to leave messages to staff members via telephone. Messages will then be delivered to the target person through telephone with speech synthesis or to desktop computer with graphical interface.