36,823 research outputs found
What Would You Ask to Your Home if It Were Intelligent? Exploring User Expectations about Next-Generation Homes
Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research is giving birth to a multitude of futuristic home scenarios and applications; however a clear discrepancy between current installations and research-level designs can be easily noticed. Whether this gap is due to the natural distance between research and engineered applications or to mismatching of needs and solutions remains to be understood. This paper discusses the results of a survey about user expectations with respect to intelligent homes. Starting from a very simple and open question about what users would ask to their intelligent homes, we derived user perceptions about what intelligent homes can do, and we analyzed to what extent current research solutions, as well as commercially available systems, address these emerging needs. Interestingly, most user concerns about smart homes involve comfort and household tasks and most of them can be currently addressed by existing commercial systems, or by suitable combinations of them. A clear trend emerges from the poll findings: the technical gap between user expectations and current solutions is actually narrower and easier to bridge than it may appear, but users perceive this gap as wide and limiting, thus requiring the AmI community to establish a more effective communication with final users, with an increased attention to real-world deploymen
Natural Notation for the Domestic Internet of Things
This study explores the use of natural language to give instructions that
might be interpreted by Internet of Things (IoT) devices in a domestic `smart
home' environment. We start from the proposition that reminders can be
considered as a type of end-user programming, in which the executed actions
might be performed either by an automated agent or by the author of the
reminder. We conducted an experiment in which people wrote sticky notes
specifying future actions in their home. In different conditions, these notes
were addressed to themselves, to others, or to a computer agent.We analyse the
linguistic features and strategies that are used to achieve these tasks,
including the use of graphical resources as an informal visual language. The
findings provide a basis for design guidance related to end-user development
for the Internet of Things.Comment: Proceedings of the 5th International symposium on End-User
Development (IS-EUD), Madrid, Spain, May, 201
Learning about End-User Development for Smart Homes by "Eating Our Own Dog Food"
SPOK is an End-User Development Environment that permits people to monitor,
control, and configure smart home services and devices. SPOK has been deployed
for more than 4 months in the homes of 5 project team members for testing and
refinement, prior to longitudinal experiments in the homes of families not
involved in the project. This article reports on the lessons learned in this
initial deployment
Dashbell: A Low-cost Smart Doorbell System for Home Use
Smart doorbells allow home owners to receive alerts when a visitor is at the
door, see who the guest is, and communicate with the visitor from a smart
device. They greatly improve people's life quality and contribute to the
evolution of smart homes. However, the commercial smart doorbells are quite
expensive, usually cost more than 190 US dollars, which is a substantial
impediment on the pervasiveness of smart doorbells. To solve this problem, we
introduce the Dashbell-a budget smart doorbell system for home use. It connects
a WiFi-enabled device, the Amazon Dash Button, to a network and enables the
home owner to answer the bell triggered by the dash button using a smartphone.
The Dashbell system also enables fast fault detection and diagnosis due to its
distributed framework.Comment: Accepted by IEEE PerCom 201
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