A Matter of Trust: Smart Home System Relying on Logic, BCI, and Sensor Agents

In this paper we sketch out a smart home system(and the reasoning mechanism behind it) designed to improve the living experience of the severely impaired, relying on logic, brain-computer interfacing (BCI) and mobile sensor agents. There exists a significant social category of people who because of either old age or conditions such as paralysis lose their ability to manage their own lives. Such persons are compelled to rely on others in order to manage their finances, expenses, daily necessities such as eating or turning on the television or dialing an emergency number. In our previous research we have described a manner in which to model emotions, as captured via BCI. Here, we extend this model to abstract and concrete concepts and employ epistemic logic and a logic of trust in order to allow communication between the person and heterogeneous agents via a BCI headset. We firstly describe a formal model for expressing reasoning as captured in its cortical projection. Secondly, we describe a communication protocol that uses a logic of trust that allows the user to give commands to specific listening agents. The system should use reasoning and logic to learn from the user commands they receive and configure routines that correspond to the usual preferences and needs. Finally, the agents, on receiving and corroborating data from other sensors that relate to vital signs of the user or that otherwise identify a crisis situation, should be able to decide when to change their task priorities andthe system should ad hoc self-configure in order to provide bestassistance to the user.