Exploring End User Programming Needs in Home Automation

Abstract

Home automation faces the challenge of providing ubiquitous, unobtrusive services while empowering users with approachable configuration interfaces. These interfaces need to provide sufficient expressiveness to support complex automation, and notations need to be devised that enable less tech-savvy users to express such scenarios. Rule-based and process-oriented paradigms have emerged as opposing ends of the spectrum; however, their underlying concepts have not been studied comparatively. We report on a contextual inquiry study in which we collected qualitative data from 18 participants in 12 households on the current potential and acceptance of home automation, as well as explored the respective benefits and drawbacks of these two notation paradigms for end users. Results show that rule-based notations are sufficient for simple automation tasks but not flexible enough for more complex use cases. The resulting insights can inform the design of interfaces for smart homes to enable usable real-world home automation for end users.

Investigating the Crowd’s Creativity for Creating On-Demand IoT Scenarios

“…Their participants found E-free tool more expressive as it allowed them to define rules without following a strict order and gave them flexibility to modify or extend their rules. Like the object composition paradigm, some processoriented (Brich et al, 2017) approaches have emerged for programming smart objects. A process-oriented approach can be considered as multi-stage automation rule chains where multiple processes-involving different set of devices and conditions-can be joined to create more complex rules.…”

“…A process-oriented approach can be considered as multi-stage automation rule chains where multiple processes-involving different set of devices and conditions-can be joined to create more complex rules. To explore the potential of the process-oriented paradigm, Brich et al (2017) conducted a contextual inquiry study with 18 participants in 12 households to explore the end-user needs for smart home automation for two-popular configurations: rule-based (if-this-then-that) and process-oriented. Their results indicate that the rules-based notation was ideal for simple scenarios but was not suitable for more complex configurations involving several devices due to the strictness of rules (joining triggers with operators) that were not easily comprehended by their participants.…”

“…To empower end-users to compose Internet of Things (IoT) applications, researchers have developed End-User Development (EUD) environments where less tech-savvy users can develop IoT applications by combining the functionalities of devices and services in a lower level of abstraction. The most commonly used EUD techniques are object composition (Desolda, Ardito, & Matera, 2017), process-oriented or rule-based (Brich, Walch, Rietzler, Weber, & Schaub, 2017), jigsaw puzzle (Danado & Paterno, 2015), interaction by demonstration (Chen, He, Anderson, Keller, & Skubic, 2006), mark-up languages and ontologies to formulate and comprehend complex logical expressions (Metaxas & Markopoulos, 2017). These lower-level abstractions prevent users from thinking of valuable applications to exploit the full range of capabilities of smart home devices and thereby create gaps between user expectations and reality; consequently halting acceptance (Clark, Newman, & Dutta, 2017).…”

Jessie

“…A main concept in EUP is empowered computing -allowing users to personalize systems to their needs and preferences [37]. They are used widely in educational contexts [40,47,65,88], and are used in HRI, home automation, and healthcare contexts [16,17,19,26,29,39,41,49,64,67,73,83,84]. However, these methods are typically procedural, so users require a basic understanding of coding constructs.…”

Smart Room System Model Using a Microcontroller for the Efficiency of Campus Operational Costs

“…Areas of interest include security functions like access control and surveillance systems, resource management with regard to water and electricity, multimedia functions for ubiquitous content stream-ing, and comfort functions like light and heat management. [3] Smart room consists of two words, smart and room. Carol L. Stimel in his book Building smart cities stated that smart is an adjective used informally to describe someone who is smart, intelligent, or generally responsive.…”