An interdisciplinary team is developing technologies and design strategies that use context-aware sensing to empower people by presenting information at precisely the right time and place. The team is designing a living laboratory to study technology that motivates behavior change in context.

People spend more time in their homes than in any other space. The home ideally provides a safe, comfortable environment in which to relax, communicate, learn, and be enter-tained. Increasingly, it is where people con¬nect with friends and family, conduct business, manage resources, learn about the world, and maintain health and autonomy as they age. People invest extraordinary amounts of time, money, and emotional energy to mold their homes into living spaces that meet their needs. Unfortunately, homes today are ill-suited to exploiting the pervasive computing applications being developed in laboratories. Most homes do not easily accommodate.

If we are to believe most movies, television, and pop-ular press articles that mention home life in the future, we will have complete control over our spaces at the touch of a button. In fact, our homes will be so fully automated and “smart” that we will rarely have to think about every¬day tasks at all. We will spend nearly all our time in the home engaged in leisure activities because digital and robotic agents will have taken over the mundane chores of day-to-day life.

Researchers and technologists are more cautious in pre¬dicting the future of the home. A survey of ongoing work shows, however, that there is a bias toward creating auto¬matic (smart) home environments that eliminate the need to think about tasks such as controlling heating and light.