Ambient Personal Environment Experiment (APEX): A Cyber-Human Prosthesis for Mental, Physical and Age-Related Disabilities

We present an emerging research project in our laboratory to extend ambient intelligence (AmI) by what we refer to as “extreme personalization” meaning that an instance of ambient intelligence is focused on one or at most a few individuals over a very long period of time. Over a lifetime of co-activity, it senses and adapts to a person's preferences and experiences, and crucially, his or her (changing) special needs; needs that differ significantly from the normal baseline. We refer to our agent-based cyber-physical system as Ambient Personal Environment eXperiment (APEX). It aims to serve as a Companion, a Coach, and a Caregiver: crucial support for individuals with mental, physical, and age-related disabilities and those other people who help them. We propose that an instance of APEX, interacting socially with each of these people, is both a social actor as well as a cyber-human prosthetic device. APEX is an ambitious integration of multiple technologies from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other disciplines. Its successful development can be viewed as a grand challenge for AI. We discuss in this paper three research thrusts that lead toward our vision: robust intelligent agents, semantically rich human-machine interaction, and reasoning from comprehensive multi-modal behavior data.