Mobile Interfaces for Better Living: Supporting Awareness in a Smart Home Environment

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes efforts toward creating an integrated living space to support heightened awareness of a user's environment. The work seeks to balance the needs and desires of an individual with those of other people within the locality, community, and world, to include basic comforts like temperature and humidity of a living environment as well as use of resources like power and water. The use of mobile technologies-already prominent among many populations-can be used to raise awareness of the needs and responsibilities of the individual and can highlight opportunities to live in ways that are friendlier to others. Mobile technologies have great promise in connecting users to their environment, and a smart environment enhanced with technology that supports better living can improve the lives of individuals, groups, and the broader community. The goals of this work are toward encouraging: 1) increased awareness of information in the user's surroundings; 2) integrated control over factors in one's surrounding and home environments; and 3) increased ability to support sustainable living for both individuals and groups. This work builds on the many smart, green, and sustainable living environment initiatives that have emerged in recent years.

Climate adaptive building shells: State-of-the-art and future challenges

“…More than in our actual building stock, traces of CABS are found as output of academic endeavors [61], in cultural exhibitions [62], and as recurring elements in design competitions like the Solar Decathlon [63], [64].…”

Smart homes and their users: a systematic analysis and key challenges

“…Irrespective of the particular technological configuration of a smart home, its purpose-according to technology developers-is ''to improve the living experience'' in some way [35,54]. This may be through new functionality such as remote control and automation of appliances, through enhancement of existing functionality such as heating management, through improved security or through the provision of assisted living services by monitoring, alerting and detecting health incidents [56].…”

Developing Design Solutions for Smart Homes Through User-Centered Scenarios

“…Research on smart homes has been conducted in various fields, but thus far, most of these are in engineering and technical sciences domain (Wilson et al, 2015). For these studies, the goal of smart homes is to improve the quality of life of residents through automated devices, to enable them to live a safe, healthy, comfortable life independently (Gračanin et al, 2011). For example, MIT AgeLab has developed a technology-based home service that integrates into everyday life to improve well-being and safety.…”

“…Technology developers and researchers claim that advanced, applied knowledge will make our lives more comfortable. Their purpose is to support the daily lives of residents through technologies, such as those for energy management, security, monitoring, and detecting incidents (Yu-Ju et al, 2002;Gračanin et al, 2011). Despite this broad range of potential and assumed benefits of technology adoption, if we focus only on technological features, the technology can disappear before they are even incorporated into our lives (Cook, 2012).…”