A generic user interface for energy management in smart homes

Abstract Building operating systems play an important role in monitoring energy consumption of devices and improving energy efficiency in household buildings. From this arises a need for a preferably flexible and full-featured user interface to visualize the energy data in the building and allow residents to collect and realize various needs and preferences to the system. This article introduces a generic user interface for building operating systems which is presented from aspects of design, implementation and evaluation. To ensure the user interface can be flexibly adapted to various types of buildings, we design a series of generic data models which are independent of any building operating system. Besides, three roles with different permissions and a number of functional components of the user interface are also introduced in the article. Based on the design, a prototype of such a generic user interface named Building Operating System User Interface (BOS UI) has been implemented to operate the Energy Smart Home Lab (ESHL) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). We evaluate the design, functionality and usability of the BOS UI qualitatively and quantitatively. The evaluation results show that the BOS UI meets a set of desired requirements (except for system configuration) for a generic user interface of building operating systems. Besides this, the evaluation experiments yielded very positive feedback in many aspects including improvement of energy efficiency and user experience. More than 90% of the test users agreed that the BOS UI provided them with enough information and functionalities that they would need in their daily lives and it can help them to save money. Furthermore, the mean score of the System Usability Scale (SUS) is 79.0, which indicates a good usability. The experiments prove that the user interface is still easy to use, despite abundant features are integrated into the system

Blindness and Online Interaction: Beyond Design Standards

The use of internet and other communication technologies has become predominantly common in the life of normal sighted users. In order to have a fair level of equality in the society, blind people must also be able to use these facilities with equal ease and effectiveness. Recent studies showed that the usage and acceptance rate of online applications among the blind community is not up to the expectations. The aim of this article is to investigate the accessibility issues faced by blind people during online interaction like eGovernment portals. Results showed that a WCAG compliant eGovernment website failed to satisfy the requirements of a sample of blind users. This article is part of on-going research aimed to uncover accessibility problems that could be faced by blinds during online interaction and are not addressed in accessibility standards. It attempts to understand cognition and perception thoughts of a blind user while interacting with a web-based environment. Keywords: Blindness, Web Accessibility, WCA

Painting the ideal home: using art to express visions of technologically supported independent living for older people in North East England

This paper describes the investigation of the development of future technological products to support older people in everyday living through the agency of a community art group. Recent research has identified a number of challenges facing designers seeking to use traditional participatory design approaches to gather technology requirements data from older people. Here, a project is described that sought to get a group of older people to think creatively about their needs and desires for technological support through the medium of paint. The artistic expression technique described in this article allowed the identification of issues that had also been found by previous research that used a range of different techniques. This indicates that the approach shows promise, as it allows information to be gathered in an environment that is comfortable and familiar using methods already known by the participants and which they find enjoyable. It provides a complement (or possible alternative) to standard protocols and has the potential benefit of extracting even richer information as the primary task for participants is enjoyable in its own right and is not associated with an interrogative process. Furthermore, it is argued that some of the key risks of traditional approaches are lessened or removed by the naturalistic setting of this approach

Rotate-and-Press: A Non-Visual Alternative to Point-and-Click

Most computer applications manifest visually rich and dense graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that are primarily tailored for an easy-and-efficient sighted interaction using a combination of two default input modalities, namely the keyboard and the mouse/touchpad. However, blind screen-reader users predominantly rely only on keyboard, and therefore struggle to interact with these applications, since it is both arduous and tedious to perform the visual \u27point-and-click\u27 tasks such as accessing the various application commands/features using just keyboard shortcuts supported by screen readers. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of a \u27rotate-and-press\u27 input modality as an effective non-visual substitute for the visual mouse to easily interact with computer applications, with specific focus on word processing applications serving as the representative case study. In this regard, we designed and developed bTunes, an add-on for Microsoft Word that customizes an off-the-shelf Dial input device such that it serves as a surrogate mouse for blind screen-reader users to quickly access various application commands and features using a set of simple rotate and press gestures supported by the Dial. Therefore, with bTunes, blind users too can now enjoy the benefits of two input modalities, as their sighted counterparts. A user study with 15 blind participants revealed that bTunes significantly reduced both the time and number of user actions for doing representative tasks in a word processing application, by as much as 65.1% and 36.09% respectively. The participants also stated that they did not face any issues switching between keyboard and Dial, and furthermore gave a high usability rating (84.66 avg. SUS score) for bTunes

Design and development of augmentative and alternative digital home control interface

This paper describes a Digital Home Interface capable of adapting layouts, styles and contents to device capability, user preferences and appliances’ features; designed with a combination of web technologies, standard languages for abstract interface definition and AAC systems. The Home Automation architecture is characterized by devices’ independence, combining eXtensible Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheet, web technologies standard languages for abstract interface definition and two basic Augmentative and Alternative Communication systems with a Java based platform. This paper includes the result of a preliminary experiment, conducted with 4 users with cerebral palsy that are daily users of Augmentative and Alternative Communication systems in October 2011Peer Reviewe