Smart offices are dynamically evolving spaces meant to enhance employees’ efficiency, but also to create a healthy and proactive working environment. In a competitive business world, the challenge of providing a balance between the efficiency and wellbeing of employees may be supported with new technologies. This paper presents the work undertaken to build the architecture needed to integrate voice assistants into smart offices in order to support employees in their daily activities, like ambient control, attendance system and reporting, but also interacting with project management services used for planning, issue tracking, and reporting. Our research tries to understand what are the most accepted tasks to be performed with the help of voice assistants in a smart office environment, by analyzing the system based on task completion and sentiment analysis. For the experimental setup, different test cases were developed in order to interact with the office environment formed by specific devices, as well as with the project management tool tasks. The obtained results demonstrated that the interaction with the voice assistant is reasonable, especially for easy and moderate utterances.

Active assisted living (AAL) aims to use innovative technologies to create supportive, inclusive, and empowering applications and environments that enable older, impaired or frail people to live independently and stay active longer in society. This chapter provides an introduction to the main concepts of AAL, provides a brief history of the evolution of such technologies, and gives a functional view of how AAL system architecture can be conceptualized. It then provides a taxonomy of AAL technologies and applications, followed by technological underpinnings of audio- and video- based AAL.