Future Human-Centric Smart Environments

Internet of Things (IoT) is already a reality, with a vast number of Internet connected objects and devices that has exceeded the number of humans on Earth. Nowadays, there is a novel IoT paradigm that is rapidly gaining ground, this is the scenario of modern human-centric smart environments, where people are not passively affected by technology, but actively shape its use and influence. However, for achieving user-centric aware IoT that brings together people and their devices into a sustainable ecosystem, first, it is necessary to deal with the integration of disparate technologies, ensuring trusted communications, managing the huge amount of data and services, and bringing users to an active involvement. In this chapter, we describe such challenges and present the interesting user-centric perspective of IoT. Furthermore, a management platform for smart environments is presented as a proposal to cover these needs, based on a layered architecture using artificial intelligent capabilities to transform raw data into semantically meaningful information used by services. Two real use cases framed in the smart buildings field exemplify the usefulness of this proposal through a real-system implementation called City Explorer. City Explorer is already deployed in several installations of the University of Murcia, where services such as energy efficiency, appliance management, and analysis of the impact of user involvement in the system are being provided at the moment.