interacting with smart environments - ph.d. thesis presentation

Interacting with Smart Environments USERS, INTERFACES, AND DEVICES

Luigi De Russis

XXVI Cycle

Scenario

• Smart Environment – small world where all kinds of smart devices are

continuously working to make inhabitants’ lives more comfortable

• Important to investigate the user’s perspective in interacting with her surrounding – no predefined interaction situation or context

– interaction can happen casually or accidentally

• Large and sparse field – the home is the selected target environment

3/24/2014 Interacting with Smart Environments 2

Main Problems

• Effective interaction between users and their

Smart Environment is still a challenging aspect

– few solutions exist, in the literature

• People must (and want to) remain in control

– they want to do “the job”

• Most of the existing solutions

– are deeply integrated inside a specific system

– do not present a set of requirements for reproducibility and further validations


Contributions and Goal


This thesis aims

at improving

the interaction

between users and

Smart Environments – by exploring challenging and

different approaches in key areas

– by providing a set of tools and applications, loosely coupled with the underlying intelligent system

– based on solid and explicit requirements

– by allowing replicability of the found solutions

DOGeye

• Challenge: effective eye-based interaction patterns

• Multimodal eye-based application – enable people with motor disabilities to control and manage

their homes

• Requirements from the COGAIN European Network of Excellence

• Good results from user testing with both experienced and not experienced eye-tracker users


Publication • D. Bonino, E. Castellina, F. Corno, L. De Russis, “DOGeye: Controlling your

Home with Eye Interaction”, Interacting with Computers, 2011

WristHome • Challenge: effective interaction

pattern with ubiquitous devices (tabs size)

• Wearable Home Access Point – low-cost and off-the-shelf – handle messages coming from the environment – quick access to commands

• Requirements from literature • Preliminary user testing and focus group shows interest

in real-world usage


Publications • D. Bonino, F. Corno, L. De Russis, “dWatch: a Personal Wrist Watch for

Smart Environments”, 3rd International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies, 2012

• L. De Russis, D. Bonino, F. Corno, “The Smart Home on Your Wrist”, HomeSys: a Ubicomp workshop, 2013

RulesBook

• Challenge: effective visual environment programming for end-users

• Rule-based task delegation – empower end-users to define desired autonomy level

• Requirements from unstructured interviews – with people living in and managing smart homes

• Preliminary user testing confirms – selected features

– viability of the approach


Publication • D. Bonino, F. Corno, L. De Russis, “A User-Friendly Interface for Rules

Composition in Intelligent Environments”, International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence, 2011

WattsUp: User Survey • Challenge: design of an innovative user interface

– to incentivize responsible and “green” energy consumption behaviors in domestic environments

• Development of a user survey, published on the Internet – presented the designed interface working in 2 different

modalities – collected information about user understanding, and

opinions or ideas on the proposed interaction paradigms

• 992 replies were received – suggestions were given to improve the presented

interface


Publication • D. Bonino, F. Corno, L. De Russis, “Home Energy Consumption Feedback: A

User Survey”, Energy and Buildings, 2012

WattsUp • Challenge: use AI to

enable fine-grained UI feedback in a cost-effective way

• An ontology has been designed – to enable the intelligent system to tackle the survey’s

requirements

• Mobile application – built upon the design and results of the user survey

• Small user testing of the overall system – 6 people – not in a real home (in lab)

– AI results indistinguishable from sensor-based values


Summary of Contributions

Name Requirements Area Validation Publication

DOGeye EU project interaction, eye-tracking

User testing Journal

WristHome Literature interaction,

wearable

User testing Conference (2 papers)

RulesBook Unstructured

interviews

visual

programming, mobile

User testing

Conference

WattsUp Web Survey Semantic

Web, mobile

User testing Journal


Other activities - a book chapter and two journal papers

Future Works

• Interactions using sensing and actuating devices already present in the environment – e.g., lighting system could provide a viable and

unobtrusive output mean in several conditions

• Wearable Computing for sensing and communication – in “medical” settings, like a nursing house (for people with

disabilities)

– for gaming and education

• On-Body Interaction – relatively new field – move input/output on the body, e.g., projected user

interfaces or bio-feedbacks


Thank you! QUESTIONS?

Luigi De Russis

[email protected]

XXVI Ph.D. Cycle

License

• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3,0)” License.

• You are free: – to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work – to Remix - to adapt the work

• Under the following conditions: – Attribution - You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the

author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

– Noncommercial - You may not use this work for commercial purposes. – Share Alike - If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may

distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

• To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/license/by-nc-sa/3.0/


http://creativecommons.org/license/by-nc-sa/3.0/





interacting with smart environments - ph.d. thesis presentation

Technology