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The purpose of this paper is to report an inter‐disciplinary experience in building a context‐aware system that provides adapted functionalities to inhabitants of a smart home. The paper focuses on the management of uncertainty that is intrinsic to pervasive computing systems.

The paper presents the principles that characterize the context‐aware architecture: the acceptability‐driven design, where privacy and acceptability are favored; the awareness of the gap between the reality of human activity and the capabilities of the capture process; the step‐by‐step abstraction of contextual information; the management of uncertainty imprecision and ignorance at individual‐ and cross‐layer levels. The paper presents the principles and describes the system architecture, focusing on the management of uncertainty.

The authors built a layered architecture that manages and propagates uncertainty, imprecision and ignorance, allowing the recognition of ambiguous contexts and the provision of adapted functionalities. The paper illustrates this architecture and an application leveraging it.

Future work will investigate the exploitation of feedback mechanisms and the recognition of context dynamics. These improvements will allow resolving inconsistencies and ambiguities in context information and improving the provision of functionalities in situations characterized by temporal developments.

The research aims at realizing the long‐term vision of smart homes that provide adapted functionalities to inhabitants: saving energy and improving comfort and quality of domestic life.

The paper introduces some principles that can be considered when designing a context‐aware system and presents an architecture that follows those principles. Researchers in the smart home and pervasive computing domains may consider this paper when designing their context‐aware architectures.