TY - CHAP AU - Calemis, Ioannis AU - Kameas, Achilles AU - Goumopoulos, Christos AU - Berg, Erik A2 - Sobh, Tarek T1 - ASTRA: An Awareness Connectivity Platform for Designing Pervasive Awareness Applications T2 - Innovations and Advances in Computer Sciences and Engineering PB - Springer Netherlands CY - PY - 2010/ VL - IS - SP - 185 EP - 190 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3658-2_32 M3 - 10.1007/978-90-481-3658-2_32 KW - stair KW - collective KW - awareness KW - platform L1 - SN - 978-90-481-3657-5 N1 - N1 - AB - Awareness systems are a class of computer mediated communication systems that help individuals or groups build and maintain a peripheral awareness of each other. Awareness systems for informal social use are still in their infancy as a technology and as a research area. Such systems promise to address pressing social problems: elderly living alone, families living apart for large parts of the working week, monitoring the well being of an ill relative, etc. The ASTRA platform, which is being developed in the context of the EU research project ASTRA, provides a generalized solution to the development of awareness applications that are based on the concept of pervasive awareness. In this paper, we shall present how smart objects in a person’s environment can be used to capture and convey awareness information under this person’s control. ER -