Easy Smart-Home Environment to Assist Patients with Mobility Impairment

Internet of Tangible Things (IoTT): Challenges and Opportunities for Tangible Interaction with IoT

“…Intuitiveness of the interaction is particularly important for older adults, as shown by the authors of the Easy Smart-Home System [55]. The result of the experience conducted with older adults confirmed that users did not need prior knowledge of the system or device to use it and they intuitively performed their tasks without focusing on the system.…”

“…Results of the meta-analysis. Type T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 T7 T8 TangiSense (Traffic) [50] System, no user evaluation X X X Active Forms [52] Theoretical X X X X AwareKit [53] System, user evaluation X X X X X CapNFC [45] System, no user evaluation X X X X Cognitive Objects [54] Theoretical X X X X Smart-home environment [55] System, user evaluation X X X TANGerINE [56] System, no user evaluation X X X X Expressing Intent [57] System, no user evaluation X X X X X VoxBox [43] System, user evaluation X X X X Invisible connections [44] Theoretical, user interviews X X X X IoT Owl [58] System, no user evaluation X X X Iyagi [59] System, no user evaluation X X TangiSense (Kitchen) [60] System, user evaluation X X Projected interfaces [61] System, no user evaluation X X X X RapIoT [62] Toolkit X X T4Tags [63] Toolkit, end-user insights X X X X X Technology Individuation [42] Theoretical, analysis of user-evaluated systems X X X X X X X Tiles [64] Toolkit X X X X X Total: 18 papers 4 theoretical, 3 toolkits, 11 systems. 7 papers include user insights 13 10 1 12 11 11 7 4 From the table, it is possible to notice that the most cited property is T1, with 13 occurrences out of 18 articles, while T3, i.e., exploring persistency of tangible interfaces, is the less mentioned (in only one paper and marginally).…”

“…Indeed, we found that 4 articles are mostly theoretical (although one of them analysed three existing systems), 3 articles present development toolkits and all the other articles (11) present a system at different level of completion (5 of these papers are published as work-in-progress). Insights from users are presented in 7 papers but only 2 of the systems were properly tested with users [43,55]. Insights from users are presented also in two theoretical papers, i.e., Vaisutis et al [44] (with user interviews) and Ambe et al [42] (with the analysis of system that were tested with users) and in a toolkit paper [63] (end-users tested a preliminary version of the toolkit, providing important insights).…”

“…For example, Grosse-Puppendahl et al [45] augmented objects with special capacitive NFC-tags to give them different functions, such as a rubber to turns on/off a lamp and a lighter to trigger a special fire-like lighting profile. Although limiting the physical embodiment to cards with icons, de la Guía et al [55] proposed task actions embodied in physical cards.…”

“…The work of Bellucci et al [63] shows the benefits of conducting exploratory evaluations with end-users and refining the system according to their feedback. Besides these articles, only two papers [43,55] provided a formal user evaluation and reported user insights, while most other work provided just preliminary evaluations or no evaluation at all. Since this is a new field of research, we can argue that most of the works are still in an exploratory or work-in-progress phase and further evaluations will be published in the future.…”