Supporting inspection strategies through palpable assemblies

The paper reports an early study on inspection strategies of highrisk systems using ambient computing technologies. Traditionally, the main goal of ambient, pervasive and ubiquitous computing applications is to make the technology transparent or invisible for the users. However this sort of technological disappearance is not always desirable in particular in presence of any failure in the system. In such an event the user would benefit from the visibility of the system state, and from adopting inspection strategies to detect the error and take, if possible, the necessary correctional measures. The paper presents a study performed in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit where novel ambient computing technologies and related inspection strategies are currently being designed and assessed in the context of the European project PalCom (http://www.ist-palcom.org/).