Companion-Technology: An Overview

Abstract

Companion-technology is an emerging field of cross-disciplinary research. It aims at developing technical systems that appear as “Companions” to their users. They serve as co-operative agents assisting in particular tasks or, in a more general sense, even give companionship to humans. Overall, Companion-technology enables technical systems to smartly adapt their services to individual users’ current needs, their requests, situation, and emotion. We give an introduction to the field, discuss the most relevant application areas that will benefit from its developments, and review the related research projects.