Reports The first annual workshop on the role of AI in ambient intelligence was held in Riva de Garda, Italy, on August 29, 2006. The workshop was colocated with the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2006). It provided an opportunity for researchers in a variety of AI subfields together with representatives of commercial interests to explore ambient intelligence technology and applications. Ambient intelligence is an AIbased paradigm with a high potential to affect daily life in the near future. The broad idea is to enrich a space (such as a room, house, building, bus station, or a critical area in a hospital) with sensors tied to intelligent software, so that the people using the space can benefit from a responsive, even wise environment.

This paper aims at developing the ambient intelligence sleep system that can derive a good sleep by providing a personally adapted sound. For this purpose, this paper explores the sounds that have a potential of deriving a good sleep and investigates their effect from the several viewpoints (e.g., the sleep latent time). To promote a good sleep, this paper focuses on heartbeat and respiration which are related to a sleep (i.e., its rate decreases as falling asleep) and proposes the ambient intelligent sleep system that provides the sound adjusted to the heartbeat and/or respiration rates, which are automatically measured by the piezoelectric-based mattress sensor without connecting any devices to human’s body. The human subjective experiments of the six subjects for a nap case and the seven subjects for a night sleep case have revealed the following implications: (1) the new wave sound adjusted to both the heartbeat rate (x 1.05) and respiration rate (x 1.05) can shorten the sleep latent time in a nap case in comparison with no sound or the other four types of the sounds; (2) the combination of the two sound sources (adjusted by the heartbeat and respiration rates) contributes to shortening the sleep latent time in comparison with one sound source; (3) the new wave sound can shorten not only the sleep latent time but also the Non-REM3 latent time in a night sleep case in comparison with no sound; and (4) the new wave sound can keep not only an appropriate sleep cycle but also the very similar sleep cycle from the Non-REM to the next one in a night sleep case in comparison with no sound.

The first annual workshop on the role of AI in ambient intelligence was held in Riva de Garda, Italy, on August 29, 2006. The workshop was colocated with the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2006). It provided an opportunity for researchers in a variety of AI subfields together with representatives of commercial interests to explore ambient intelligence technology and applications.