A Simulator for Generating and Visualizing Sensor Data for Ambient Intelligence Environments

The development of ambient intelligence environments has become a complex task and faces several challenges due to improved sensing possibilities and new fields of application, like detecting activities of daily living or classifying situations. Without having representative test data for experimentation during the development phase, the choice of suitable sensors and classification mechanisms becomes a critical issue. From an economical point of view, hardware and test labs are expensive and require lead time before test data are generated. To compensate the temporal gap, data needs to be simulated until real data are available for testing. In this paper we present an adaptive and extensible simulator which can be used during the design phase to generate data from various sensors within a simulated ambient intelligence environment. Our approach allows generating and visualizing different sensor data as well as simulating faulty or unexpected sensor behaviour.