Sentient artefacts: Acquiring user's context through daily objects

In this paper, we describe an augmentation of everyday artefact called sentient artefact. A sentient artefact is expected to capture the user's specific context implicitly and naturally from its original usage since such an everyday artefact has inherent roles and functionalities. Therefore, a context-aware space is built incrementally using the specific contextual information. We show three types of everyday artefact augmentation, and propose a sensor selection framework that allows an artefact developer to systematically identify desirable sensors. Also, we discuss expectations and issues on the augmentation through prototyping.