Recent developments within Ambient Intelligence and Agent Technology provide new possibilities to contribute to personal care. For example, an intelligent ambient agent in our car may monitor us and warn us when we are falling asleep while driving or take measures when we are too drunk to drive. As another example, an elderly person may wear a device with an ambient agent that monitors his or her wellbeing and generates an action when a dangerous situation is noticed.

Such Ambient Intelligence applications can be based on the one hand on possibilities to acquire sensor information about humans and their functioning, but on the other hand, more knowledgeable applications crucially depend on the availability of adequate knowledge for analysis of such information about human functioning. If such knowledge about human functioning is computationally available in intelligent software/hardware devices in the environment, such ambient agents can show more human-like understanding and contribute to personal care based on this understanding.

In recent years, scientific areas focusing on human functioning such as cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience and biomedical sciences have made substantial progress in providing an increased insight in the various physical and mental aspects of human functioning. Although much work still remains to be done, models have been developed for a variety of such aspects and the way in which humans (try to) manage or regulate them. From a more biomedical angle, examples of such aspects are (management of) heart functioning, diabetes, eating regulation disorders, and HIV-infection. From a more psychological and social angle, examples are emotion regulation, attention regulation, addiction management, trust management, stress management, and criminal behaviour management.

If models of human processes and their management are represented in a formal and computational format, and incorporated in the human environment monitoring the physical and mental state of the human, then such ambient agents are able to perform a more in-depth analysis of the human’s functioning. An ambience is created that has a human-like understanding of humans, based on computationally formalised knowledge from the human-directed disciplines, and that may more effectively affect the state of humans by undertaking in a knowledgeable manner actions that improve their wellbeing and performance.

This may concern elderly people and patients, but also humans in highly demanding circumstances or tasks. For example, the workspaces of naval officers may include systems that, among others, track their eye movements and characteristics of incoming stimuli (e.g., airplanes on a radar screen), and use this information in a computational model that is able to estimate where their attention is focussed at. When it turns out that an officer neglects parts of a radar screen, such a system can either indicate this to the person, or arrange on the background that another person or computer system takes care of this neglected part.

This workshop series addresses multidisciplinary aspects of Ambient Intelligence and Agent Systems with human-directed disciplines such as psychology, social science, neuroscience and biomedical sciences. The first workshop in the series (HAI'07) took place at the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI'07), in Darmstadt, Germany, November 2007. The aim of the workshops is to get researchers together from these human-directed disciplines or working on cross connections of Ambient Intelligence with these disciplines. The focus is on the use of knowledge from these disciplines in Ambient Intelligence applications, in order to take care of and support in a knowledgeable manner humans in their daily living in medical, psychological and social respects.

The workshop can play an important role, for example, to get modellers in the psychological, neurological, social or biomedical disciplines interested in Ambient Intelligence as a high-potential application area for their models, and, for example, get inspiration for problem areas to be addressed for further developments in their disciplines. From the other side, the workshop may make researchers in Ambient Intelligence, Agent Systems, and Artificial Intelligence more aware of the possibilities to incorporate more substantial knowledge from the psychological, neurological, social and biomedical disciplines in Ambient Intelligence applications. As part of the interaction, specifications may be generated for experiments to be addressed by the human-directed sciences.