Information processing technologies should be able to support people in every aspect of their everyday life, with information processing units embedded in the environment which communicate with portable or wearable personal devices. The keywords are “here, now and me” rather than “wherever, whenever, whoever”.

We want to add one more element to the vision, the concept of situatedness. Ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence put stress on having sensors in the environment to sense the context of the user. However, I define situation not as something to be sensed or computed, but something to be used as it is. We should not design a system that acts on the sense-represent-compute-act cycle. Rather, we should design a system that can set up the context appropriately.

Cyber Assist project was conducted under the above philosophy. In this chapter, we overview the project under the light of ambient intelligence.