Autonomous capabilities are required in AmI environments in order to adapt systems to new environmental conditions and situations. However, keeping the human in the loop and in control of such systems is still necessary because of the diversity of systems, domains, environments, context situations, and social and legal constraints, which makes full autonomy a utopia within the short or medium term. Human-system integration introduces an important number of challenges and problems that have to be solved. On the one hand, humans should interact with systems even in those situations where their attentional, cognitive, and physical resources are limited in order to perform the interaction. On the other hand, systems must avoid overwhelming the user with unnecessary actions. Therefore, appropriate user-centered methods for AmI development should be used to help designers analyze and design human-in-the-loop interactions in AmI environments. This paper presents a user-centered design method that defines a process with a set of tools and techniques that supports the process steps in order to systematically design, prototype, and validate human-in-the-loop (HiL) solutions. The process starts with the definition of the HiL design, which defines how the system cooperates with the human. This HiL design is built using a conceptual framework that focuses on achieving human-system interactions that get human attention and avoid obtrusiveness. Then, we provide a software infrastructure to generate a prototype based on the HiL design and validate it by having end-users use a web simulator. The feedback data generated during the prototype user validation is gathered and used by a machine learning tool that infers the user’s needs and preferences. Finally, these inferences are used to automatically enhance the human-in-the-loop designs and prototypes. We have validated the proposed method through a twofold perspective: an experiment to analyze the perception of interaction designers regarding their acceptance of the design method and another experiment to evaluate the usefulness of the “smart” prototyping technique. The results obtained point out the acceptability of the proposed method by designers and the useful adaptations provided by the “smart” prototyping technique to achieve a HiL design that adapts well to users’ preferences and needs.

AmI环境中需要具有自治功能，以使系统适应新的环境条件和情况。但是，由于系统，领域，环境，上下文情况以及社会和法律限制的多样性，仍然需要使人们处于循环状态并控制此类系统，这使得短期或中期的完全自治成为乌托邦。人机集成带来了许多必须解决的挑战和问题。一方面，即使在注意力，认知和身体资源有限的情况下，人类也应与系统进行交互以执行交互。另一方面，系统必须避免通过不必要的操作使用户不知所措。因此，应该使用适当的以用户为中心的AmI开发方法来帮助设计人员分析和设计AmI环境中的人与人之间的交互。本文提出了一种以用户为中心的设计方法，该方法使用一组支持过程步骤的工具和技术来定义过程，以便系统地设计，原型设计和验证“在环”（HiL）解决方案。该过程始于HiL设计的定义，该定义定义了系统如何与人类协作。此HiL设计使用一个概念框架构建，该框架专注于实现人与人之间的交互，从而引起人们的注意并避免干扰。然后，我们提供了一个软件基础结构，可以根据HiL设计生成原型，并通过让最终用户使用Web模拟器对其进行验证。在原型用户验证期间生成的反馈数据由机器学习工具收集和使用，以推断用户的需求和偏好。最后，这些推论用于自动增强“在环设计”和原型。我们已经从双重角度验证了该方法的有效性：一个用于分析交互设计师对他们接受设计方法的看法的实验，以及另一个用于评估“智能”原型技术的有效性的实验。获得的结果指出了设计人员对所提出方法的接受程度，以及“智能”原型技术所提供的有用的改进方法，以实现可很好地适应用户偏好和需求的HiL设计。