Physiological computing is an interesting and promising concept to widen the communication channel between the (human) users and computers, thus allowing an increase of software systems' contextual awareness and rendering software systems smarter than they are today. Using physiological inputs in pervasive computing systems allows re-balancing the information asymmetry between the human user and the computer system: while pervasive computing systems are well able to flood the user with information and sensory input (such as sounds, lights, and visual animations), users only have a very narrow input channel to computing systems; most of the time, restricted to keyboards, mouse, touchscreens, accelerometers and GPS receivers (through smartphone usage, e.g.). Interestingly, this information asymmetry often forces the user to subdue to the quirks of the computing system to achieve his goals -- for example, users may have to provide information the software system demands through a narrow, time-consuming input mode that the system could sense implicitly from the human body. Physiological computing is a way to circumvent these limitations; however, systematic means for developing and moulding physiological computing applications into software are still unknown.

This thesis proposes a methodological approach to the creation of physiological computing applications that makes use of component-based software engineering. Components help imposing a clear structure on software systems in general, and can thus be used for physiological computing systems as well. As an additional bonus, using components allow physiological computing systems to leverage reconfigurations as a means to control and adapt their own behaviours. This

adaptation can be used to adjust the behaviour both to the human and to the available computing environment in terms of resources and available devices - an activity that is crucial for complex physiological computing systems. With the help of components and reconfigurations, it is possible to structure the functionality of physiological computing applications in a way that makes them manageable and extensible, thus allowing a stepwise and systematic extension of a system's intelligence.

Using reconfigurations entails a larger issue, however. Understanding and fully capturing the behaviour of a system under reconfiguration is challenging, as the system may change its structure in ways that are difficult to fully predict. Therefore, this thesis also introduces a means for formal verification of reconfigurations based on assume-guarantee contracts. With the proposed assume-guarantee contract framework, it is possible to prove that a given system design (including component behaviours and reconfiguration specifications) is satisfying real-time properties expressed as assume-guarantee contracts using a variant of real-time linear temporal logic introduced in this thesis - metric interval temporal logic for reconfigurable systems.

Finally, this thesis embeds both the practical approach to the realisation of physiological computing systems and formal verification of reconfigurations into Scrum, a modern and agile software development methodology. The surrounding methodological approach is intended to provide a frame for the systematic development of physiological computing systems from first psychological findings to a working software system with both satisfactory functionality and software quality aspects.

By integrating practical and theoretical aspects of software engineering into a self-contained development methodology, this thesis proposes a roadmap and guidelines for the creation of new physiological computing applications.