Tangible User Interface Design for Home Automation Energy Management Appliances

Home Automation System connects the digital technology and computers to the appliances at home and manages it. It's the frequency of use an position in the home that makes it important to have an aesthetic friendly user interface. There are numerous UI design cases of Display panel or the buttons. However, the usability or aesthetic sensibility design through using a variety of multi-layered emotional satisfaction of feeling that provides the interface design needs to be studied. This study explores the ways to satisfy the emotional needs of Home Automation System and Tangible User Interface (TUI).OAIID:oai:osos.snu.ac.kr:snu2010-01/104/0000025799/16SEQ:16PERF_CD:SNU2010-01EVAL_ITEM_CD:104USER_ID:0000025799ADJUST_YN:NEMP_ID:A075458DEPT_CD:611CITE_RATE:0FILENAME:Tangible User Interface Design for Home Automation Energy Management Appliances.pdfDEPT_NM:디자인학부EMAIL:[email protected]:

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

FSEA 2014 – Proceedings of the AVI 2014 Workshop on Fostering Smart Energy Applications through Advanced Visual Interfaces

It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to FSEA 2014, the AVI 2014 workshop on Fostering Smart Energy Applications through Advanced Visual Interfaces. This workshop focuses on advanced interaction, interface, and visualization techniques for energy-related applications, tools, and services. It brings together researchers and practitioners from a diverse range of background, including interaction design, human-computer interaction, visualization, computer games, and other fields concerned with the development of advanced visual interfaces for smart energy applications. FSEA 2014 is the result of the efforts of many people involved in its organization, including our programme committee, and others who have assisted us in putting this workshop together

Smart Homes and Sustainable Cities: The Design of a Low-Cost Solution for Comprehensive Home Automation

The challenge for smart cities is to connect as many of its inhabitants to technology enabling solutions that improve their lives. Smart homes provide all users a means of interacting and impacting their environment. In developing economies this proves challenging and these challenges are daunting and overwhelming since system costs are always a foreboding factor. The chapter addresses these challenges by providing a low-cost solution for a home energy saving measure. It introduces an overview of enabling technologies for a smart home by considering energy management, energy saving, load management and monitoring and control of living spaces. By leveraging the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and load management strategies, the realisation of a smart home is made possible. This chapter presents a broad overview of the design and development of a web-enabled smart home solution. Web development and control systems together form the backbone of automation for modern home automation technologies such as the Internet of Things and embedded systems. The developed web-enabled home automation incorporates elements of web developed software application and digital control systems. The web-enabled interface energy saving measure is a networked system that uses web-enabled applications for enabling energy efficiency by incorporating load management, remote power consumption, monitoring and control

Augmenting objects at home through programmable sensor tokens: A design journey

End-user development for the home has been gaining momentum in research. Previous works demonstrate feasibility and potential but there is a lack of analysis of the extent of technology needed and its impact on the diversity of activities that can be supported. We present a design exploration with a tangible end-user toolkit for programming smart tokens embedding different sensing technologies. Our system allows to augment physical objects with smart tags and use trigger-action programming with multiple triggers to define smart behaviors. We contribute through a field-oriented study that provided insights on (i) household's activities as emerging from people's lived experience in terms of high-level goals, their ephemerality or recurrence, and the types of triggers, actions and interactions with augmented objects, and (ii) the programmability needed for supporting desired behaviors. We conclude that, while trigger action covers most scenarios, more advanced programming and direct interaction with physical objects spur novel uses.This work was supported by the 2015 UC3M Mobility Grant, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2014-56534-R, CREAx) and by the Academy of Finland (286440, Evidence)

Interacting with Smart Environments: Users, Interfaces, and Devices

A Smart Environment is an environment enriched with disappearing devices, acting together to form an “intelligent entity”. In such environments, the computing power pervades the space where the user lives, so it becomes particularly important to investigate the user’s perspective in interacting with her surrounding. Interaction, in fact, occurs when a human performs some kind of activity using any computing technology: in this case, the computing technology has an intelligence of its own and can potentially be everywhere. There is no well-defined interaction situation or context, and interaction can happen casually or accidentally. The objective of this dissertation is to improve the interaction between such complex and different entities: the human and the Smart Environment. To reach this goal, this thesis presents four different and innovative approaches to address some of the identified key challenges. Such approaches, then, are validated with four corresponding software solutions, integrated with a Smart Environment, that I have developed and tested with end-users. Taken together, the proposed solutions enable a better interaction between diverse users and their intelligent environments, provide a solid set of requirements, and can serve as a baseline for further investigation on this emerging topic

DESIGN OF A HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM USING ARDUINO WITH WIRELESS CONTROL

The rapid growth of technology has drastically changed the living standards of modern society. Seeing the increasing number of electronic devices being made in a household, an automated home control system has become an increasing useful feature. Current systems, however, have problems with complexity, high costs, non-open sources and multiple incompatible standards; resulting in the limited venture of the home automation into the homes of the rich or hobbyists. This project intends to design an open source, affordable and easy to use home automation system, which will be done by interfacing the open source Arduino microcontroller with web browser; creating a simple, easy-to-use system to control home appliances. The project was carried out in several stages. The Arduino is first setup for Wi-Fi connection and web browser interfacing. Next, the system is made to work with appliances in a home model. Last of all, a simple user interface is created using HTML to make the system user friendly, completing the home automation system design. The home automation system design was successfully implemented. Using web browser on laptop and smartphone, connection was made to Arduino through wireless network, allowing for control of the appliances in the home model

Zero and low carbon buildings: A driver for change in working practices and the use of computer modelling and visualization

Buildings account for significant carbon dioxide emissions, both in construction and operation. Governments around the world are setting targets and legislating to reduce the carbon emissions related to the built environment. Challenges presented by increasingly rigorous standards for construction projects will mean a paradigm shift in how new buildings are designed and managed. This will lead to the need for computational modelling and visualization of buildings and their energy performance throughout the life-cycle of the building. This paper briefly outline how the UK government is planning to reduce carbon emissions for new buildings. It discusses the challenges faced by the architectural, construction and building management professions in adjusting to the proposed requirements for low or zero carbon buildings. It then outlines how software tools, including the use of visualization tools, could develop to support the designer, contractor and user

A System for Controlling, Monitoring and Programming the Home

As technology becomes ever more pervasive, the challenges of home automation are increasingly apparent. Seamless home control, home monitoring and home programming by the end user have yet to enter the mainstream. This could be attributed to the challenge of developing a fully autonomous and extensible home system that can support devices and technologies of differing protocols and functionalities. In order to offer programming facilities to the user, the underlying rule system must be fully independent, allowing support for current and future devices. Additional challenges arise from the need to detect and handle conflicts that may arise among user rules and yield undesirable results. Non-technical individuals typically struggle when faced with a programming task. It is therefore vital to encourage and ease the process of programming the home. This thesis presents Homer, a home system that has been developed to support three key features of a home system: control, monitoring and programming. Homer supports any third-party hardware or software service that can expose its functionality through Java and conform to the Homer interface. Stand-alone end user interfaces can be written by developers to offer any of Homer's functionality. Where policies (i.e. rules) for the home are concerned, Homer offers a fully independent policy system. The thesis presents a custom policy language, Homeric, that has been designed specifically for writing home rules. The Homer policy system detects overlaps and conflicts among rules using constraint satisfaction and the effect on environment variables. The thesis also introduces the notion of perspectives to ease user interactivity. These have been integrated into Homer to accommodate the range of ways in which a user may think about different aspects and features of their home. These perspectives include location, device type, time and people-oriented points of view. Design guidelines are also discussed to aid end user programming of the home. The work presented in this thesis demonstrates a system that supports control, monitoring and programming of the home. Developers can quickly and easily add functionality to the home through components. Conflicts can be detected amongst rules within the home. Finally, design guidelines and a prototype interface have been developed to allow both technically minded and non-technical people to program their home

Using tangible user interfaces for teaching concepts of internet of things: usability and learning effectiveness

Purpose This paper aims to explore the use of tangible user interfaces for teaching concepts related to internet of things by focusing on two aspects, notably, usability and learning effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach To assess the usability of IoTTT, Nielsen’s principles were used due to its relevance and popularity for usability assessment. In the usability questionnaire, four attributes were evaluated, notably, learnability, efficiency, errors and satisfaction. As for evaluating learning effectiveness, learning assessment was conducted through pre-tests and post-tests. Two groups of 20 students participated where the first group attended conventional lectures on IoT, whereas the second group used IoTTT for learning same concepts. In the process, data was collected through the usability questionnaire and tests for usability and learning effectiveness assessment. Findings Results revealed a positive score for the usability of the TUI solution with an average rating of 3.9. Although this score demonstrated an acceptable solution, different issues were identified, based on which a set of recommendations have been made in this paper. On the other hand, in the common pre-tests, an average score of 6.40 was obtained as compared to a mean score of 7.33 in the post-tests for all participants. Knowledge gains were significantly higher for students who learnt IoT concepts through the TUI-based system where performance improved by 18 per cent. Originality/value The results revealed in this study are expected to help the research community, course designers and tutors comprehend the prospects of using tangible user interfaces to foster teaching and learning of IoT concepts. In addition, educational solution providers could consider commercialisation prospects of this technology to innovate in teaching and learning, while also building-up on limitations identified within this study