Ubiquitous Computing in a Home Environment, Controlling Consumer Electronics

Building interaction prototypes for ubiquitous computing is inherently difficult, since it involves a number of different devices and systems. Prototyping is an important step in developing and evaluating interaction concepts. The ideal prototyping methodology should offer high fidelity at a relatively low cost. This thesis describes the development of interaction concepts for controlling consumer electronics in a ubiquitous computing home environment, as well as the setup, based on immersive virtual reality, used to develop and evaluate the interaction concepts. Off-the-shelf input/output devices and a game engine are used for developing two concepts for device discovery and two concepts for device interaction. The interaction concepts are compared in a controlled experiment in order to evaluate the concepts as well as the virtual reality setup. Statistically significant differences and subjective preferences could be observed in the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. Overall, the results suggest that the interaction concepts could be acceptable to some users for some use cases and that the virtual reality setup offers the possibility to quickly build interaction concepts which can be evaluated and compared in a controlled experiment

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

Study on the perception of DIY in domotics in Portugal

The growth of the home automation market depends on technological innovations, rapid evolution of the Internet of Things and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) solutions. This project analysed the perception about domotics related to DIY in Portugal, intending to understand if smart home technologies are used and valued, which factors motivate their acquisition, their purpose and the advantages perceived by users. A questionnaire was used to collect data, resulting in an exploratory study based on data from a convenience sample. The model to evaluate this study was based on the constructs based on Technology Acceptance Models - TAM. From the results obtained, it was concluded that the respondents have a positive perception about domotics and its usefulness faced with DIY on the technologies that make a smart home. Regarding the acquisition and installation of technologies associated with home automation on their own, the respondents are divided, as half consider that they can do it autonomously and the other half only with the intervention of specialists in home automation

Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

Design of a Scenario-Based Immersive Experience Room

open1noopenKlopfenstein, Cuno LorenzKlopfenstein, CUNO LOREN

Space shuttle avionics system

The Space Shuttle avionics system, which was conceived in the early 1970's and became operational in the 1980's represents a significant advancement of avionics system technology in the areas of systems and redundacy management, digital data base technology, flight software, flight control integration, digital fly-by-wire technology, crew display interface, and operational concepts. The origins and the evolution of the system are traced; the requirements, the constraints, and other factors which led to the final configuration are outlined; and the functional operation of the system is described. An overall system block diagram is included

Web on TV - Designing web content for enhanced user experience on an internet-connected television device

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe Internet is gradually expanding to many new devices, in addition to its original native environment that was the Personal Computer. This wave started with mobile devices and as we enter the Internet of Things era, connectivity is possible from cars to light switches. One of the first devices, to follow mobiles, is the Television. Connectivity and two-way interaction on the TV device has in fact started even in the first days of the medium, but had failed to make it widely available, due to technological limitations of the past. Now, this has changed, with the Smart TV devices that can utilize the fast internet connections that are available in most developed countries. However, even though the technology and devices are now widely available there are still challenges in order to make the vast Internet and web content available in the Smart TVs. These challenges, have a familiar resemblance to what happened a few years ago, when internet connectivity was introduced on the mobile phone. Although, it was “feasible” to access any webpage from your mobile device, the experience for the user was often very frustrating, due to many factors, that derived from the fact that the web was designed for large screens and mice of the desktop computers, not the small touch screens and limited hardware of the phone. Nonetheless, these obstacles were successfully overcome, by introducing techniques and methodologies (e.g. Responsive Web Design) to make the web more mobile-friendly and also work from the manufacturers to improve their devices to this direction as well. The success of these actions is now evident, since the access to the web from mobile devices has surpassed the PC, and it is now a standard practice for every new website to be mobile-friendly. In this research work, we will attempt to do one very significant step towards this direction for the Smart TV. In other words, to discover what has to be done to make the web more TV-friendly. To do this, we explore many different TV devices from several manufacturers and see their similarities and differences. We explore numerous user studies and surveys to discover what is the problem in the Web experience on the TV, so that we can propose solutions to make web content TV-friendly. Based on these findings, we design prototypes and put them to the test on different devices and userevaluation. Finally, we propose a set of guidelines, that web designers can apply on their websites to make them TV-friendly, in the hope to introduce the first step towards a friendlier internet era for the TV

Novel Attacks and Defenses for Enterprise Internet-of-Things (E-IoT) Systems

This doctoral dissertation expands upon the field of Enterprise Internet-of-Things (E-IoT) systems, one of the most ubiquitous and under-researched fields of smart systems. E-IoT systems are specialty smart systems designed for sophisticated automation applications (e.g., multimedia control, security, lighting control). E-IoT systems are often closed source, costly, require certified installers, and are more robust for their specific applications. This dissertation begins with an analysis of the current E-IoT threat landscape and introduces three novel attacks and defenses under-studied software and protocols heavily linked to E-IoT systems. For each layer, we review the literature for the threats, attacks, and countermeasures. Based on the systematic knowledge we obtain from the literature review, we propose three novel attacks and countermeasures to protect E-IoT systems. In the first attack, we present PoisonIvy, several attacks developed to show that malicious E-IoT drivers can be used to compromise E-IoT. In response to PoisonIvy threats, we describe Ivycide, a machine-learning network-based solution designed to defend E-IoT systems against E-IoT driver threats. As multimedia control is a significant application of E-IoT, we introduce is HDMI-Walk, a novel attack vector designed to demonstrate that HDMI\u27s Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) protocol can be used to compromise multiple devices through a single connection. To defend devices from this threat, we introduce HDMI-Watch, a standalone intrusion detection system (IDS) designed to defend HDMI-enabled devices from HDMI-Walk-style attacks. Finally, this dissertation evaluates the security of E-IoT proprietary protocols with LightingStrike, a series of attacks used to demonstrate that popular E-IoT proprietary communication protocols are insecure. To address LightningStrike threats, we introduce LGuard, a complete defense framework designed to defend E-IoT systems from LightingStrike-style attacks using computer vision, traffic obfuscation, and traffic analysis techniques. For each contribution, all of the defense mechanisms proposed are implemented without any modification to the underlying hardware or software. All attacks and defenses in this dissertation were performed with implementations on widely-used E-IoT devices and systems. We believe that the research presented in this dissertation has notable implications on the security of E-IoT systems by exposing novel threat vectors, raising awareness, and motivating future E-IoT system security research