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The thriving field of Smart Environments has allowed computing devices to gain new capabilities and develop new interfaces, thus becoming more and more part of our lives. In many of these areas it is unthinkable to renounce to the assisting functionality such as e.g. comfort and safety functions during driving, safety functionality while working in an industrial plant, or self-optimization of daily activities with a Smartwatch. Adults spend a lot of time on flexible surfaces such as in the office chair, in bed or in the car seat. These are crucial parts of our environments. Even though environments have become smarter with integrated computing gaining new capabilities and new interfaces, mostly rigid surfaces and objects have become smarter. In this thesis, I build on the advantages flexible and bendable surfaces have to offer and look into the creation process of assistive Smart Environment applications leveraging these surfaces. I have done this with three main contributions. First, since most Smart Environment applications are built-in into rigid surfaces, I extend the body of knowledge by designing new assistive applications integrated in flexible surfaces such as comfortable chairs, beds, or any type of soft, flexible objects. These developed applications offer assistance e.g. through preventive functionality such as decubitus ulcer prevention while lying in bed, back pain prevention while sitting on a chair or emotion detection while detecting movements on a couch. Second, I propose a new framework for the design process of flexible surface prototypes and its challenges of creating hardware prototypes in multiple iterations, using resources such as work time and material costs. I address this research challenge by creating a simulation framework which can be used to design applications with changing surface shape. In a first step I validate the simulation framework by building a real prototype and a simulated prototype and compare the results in terms of sensor amount and sensor placement. Furthermore, I use this developed simulation framework to analyse the influence it has on an application design if the developer is experienced or not. Finally, since sensor capabilities play a major role during the design process, and humans come often in contact with surfaces made of fabric, I combine the integration advantages of fabric and those of capacitive proximity sensing electrodes. By conducting a multitude of capacitive proximity sensing measurements, I determine the performance of electrodes made by varying properties such as material, shape, size, pattern density, stitching type, or supporting fabric. I discuss the results from this performance evaluation and condense them into e-textile capacitive sensing electrode guidelines, applied exemplary on the use case of creating a bed sheet for breathing rate detection.

Affective computing allows machines to simulate and detect emotional states. The most common method is the observation of the face by camera. However, in our increasingly observed society, more privacy-aware methods are worth exploring that do not require facial images, but instead look at other physiological indicators of emotion. In this work we present the Emotive Couch, a sensor-augmented piece of smart furniture that detects proximity and motion of the human body. We present the design rationale and use standard machine learning techniques to detect the three basic emotions Anxiety, Interest, and Relaxation. We evaluate the performance of our approach with 15 participants in a study that includes various affect elicitation methods, achieving an accuracy of 77.7 %.

Supporting persons with Down's Syndrome in their daily activities using ICT is a key element in further advancing their independence and integration into society. The POSEIDON project embraces this goals and develops technology which creates adjustable and personalizable assistive systems. We present a system for Money-Handling Training and assistance for shopping. In this paper we present results of evaluating the Money-Handling Training App in different pilot studies and work-shops, with a larger group of persons with Down's Syndrome, comparing different interaction devices like tablet, personal computer and interactive table. Furthermore, we present evaluation results for the Shopping App.