Perspectives on “Smart Home” from the viewpoint of HCI

1. The Home of the Future
Perspectives on “Smart Home” from the viewpoint of HCI

2. Contents
Smart Home State-of-the-Art *
What is the Wise Home?
Smart Home Research Areas
Contributions to these Research Areas
Conclusions / Outlook
* The focus of research is COTS (consumer off the shelf) systems
available on the mass market.

3. A state-of-the-art Smart Home

4. What about the future?
What could the smart home of the future look like?
Increased Automation
Multimodal Interaction
“Smartness” (e.g. Smart TV, UPnP, DLNA)

5. “Actually, I do have a vision for the nation, and our goal is a simple
one: By the time I leave office, I want every single American to be able
to set the clock on his VCR.” G.W. Bush (US President), 1990
…he failed. D. Norman (HCI Guru), 2010

6. Challenges for future Homes
Hardware Installation, Network Configuration, NAT-Routing, Port
Forward, Firewall Setting, Remote Maintenance, Web Interface,
Device Pairing, Scenario Programming, Parameterization, Finetuning,
3G Access, …

7. But why should we care about Smart Homes ?
Demographic Change
Increase of Self Service
Ubiquitous Computing, Embedded Devices

8. What constitutes a Wise Home?
different possibilities.
A Wise home is to its users like a mother to her child. She is supporting when
necessary, but lets the child learn from own experiences, mistakes and
successes. However, when the child is in danger or not able to solve the
problem on its own, she intervenes.
State-of-the-Art smart Homes don’t work that way.
They have to be pre-programmed in a strict and un-flexible way.
They are not adaptive to changing needs.
They are overruling their users.
They do not learn from experiences.
The Wise home will be different…

9. Smart vs. Wise
Smart Home
One size fits all, rule-based
Limited technology
Focus on technology
Artificially-evaluated
Wise Home
Adaptive, context-sensitive
Based on open platforms
Multidisciplinary approach
Real world evaluation

10. Research Areas
Comfort
Control
HCI Aspects:
End User Programming
Configuration
Security
Safety
HCI Aspects:
Automation
Activity Pattern
Ageing
Well-being
HCI Aspects:
Ambient Assisted Living
Remote Care
Energy
Environment
HCI Aspects:
Visualization
Recommendation

11. Ageing / Well-being
Challenges of demographic change are intensively
researched in AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) (Steg et al.)
80% of topography of EU 27 constitutes rural area
25% of population are living there (Eurostat)
 Research on this specific context is
underrepresented
 Achieved Results can be applied
to other environments
The region I grew up

12. Comfort
We spend around 70% of our time in our homes
 The goal is to make it as comfortable as possible
General tendency to self-service (including “programming” tasks)
At the end of 2012 about 90 million people were doing some sort of
programming (About one third of them are professional programmers).
End user programming is already an essential part of our daily lives.
(Holloway et al.)
But people do not want to control devices, they want to have better
control of their lives. (Davidoff et al.)
 Interfaces have to focus on Usability and User Experience

13. Safety / Security
Correlated to the amount of time spent at home, safety and security
aspects are of relative importance
“…falls among the elderly, is increasing at a faster rate than demographic
trends”
“…incidence … is rising in the area of home and leisure“
(European Injuries Report, 2009, 2010)
Product and non-product related causes of fatal home injuriesComprehensive View on injuries in EU 27 by domain
(unintentional injuries)

14. Energy / Environment
different possibilities.
Decline of fossil energy supply
Raising energy costs
Smart Homes can (in combination with other measures) help in
saving energy
For example with the “Standby”
problem
Lebot et al. Global Implications of Standby Power Use. Proceedings of ACEEE, 2000

15. Contributions
Comfort
Control
HCI Aspects:
End User Programming
Configuration
Security
Safety
HCI Aspects:
Automation
Activity Pattern
Ageing
Well-being
HCI Aspects:
Ambient Assisted Living
Remote Care
Energy
Environment
HCI Aspects:
Visualization
Recommendation

16. In order to be able to establish a Wise home, technological issues have to be
solved in advance.
A basic platform was built using the following components
Smart Home Platform Living Lab Administration Platform Household 37
General Contribution
different possibilities.
Multilayer OSGI
Hardware Abstraction
Experimental
Evaluation
Live Status View of
21 installations,
~ 2 Million Data Sets
60 Components
4 Users
Real World Settings
Contributors: A.J. Fercher – Platform Enhancement and Integration, Adminstration Platform, D.Felsing – Basic Platform, W.Rabl –
Multiplatform Interface, B. Grötschnig – Activity Pattern Recognition, R. Samselnig – Indoor Tracking, S. Karumanchi – Smart
Doorbell, M. Florian – Multiuser Interaction, C. Ayuningtyas – User Pattern Recognition, J.Brown – Calm Interaction

17. Contribution to Ageing / Well-being
Casa Vecchia (ital. altes Haus)
Funded by Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Ambient Assisted Living in Rural Area
Longitudinal Field Study, 20 Real World Households, 3 Years.
Leitner et al.: Applicability and Usability of Off-the-shelf Smart Appliances in Telecare. Proceedings of IEEE AINA, 2007
Leitner et al.: Potenziale und Herausforderungen von AAL im ländlichen Raum, Proceedings of German AAL Congress, 2011

18. Contribution to Ageing / Well-being
Off-the-shelf systems can support independent living
- even under sub-optimal circumstances
Unobtrusive environmental sensors do not disturb daily living
Innovative interaction concepts simplify the access to ICT
Technology can enhance different aspects of life (e.g. social network)
Leitner et al.: Applicability and Usability of Off-the-shelf Smart Appliances in Telecare. Proceedings of IEEE AINA, 2007
Leitner et al.: Potenziale und Herausforderungen von AAL im ländlichen Raum, Proceedings of german AAL Congress, 2011
Smartphone of
trusted persons
Alternative User Interface Metaphor

19. Contribution to Comfort / Control
Two-step study was performed addressing the following questions:
- Are so-called “home scenarios” relevant?
- If yes, how can they be supported by a computerized system?
Leitner et al.: Scenario Programming 2013, Proceeedings of Southchi 2013.
Leitner et al.: AAL 4 ALL – a matter of User Experience, Proceedings of ICOST 2010.
Leitner et al.: Usability - Key Factor of Future Smart Home Systems, Proceedings of HOIT 2007.
Card Sorting Pretest (OUR) Digital Prototype

20. Contribution to Comfort / Control
Leitner et al.: Scenario Programming, 2013
N = 36, 2-step Approach, Card Sorting, Digital Prototyping
Competitive System 1 (OSS) Competitive System 2 (EPS)

21. Contribution to Comfort / Control
Leitner et al.: Scenario Programming, Southchi 2013

22. Contribution to Safety / Security
Leitner et al.: Decision support in the smart home, Recsys Workshops, 2011.
Leitner et al.: Reducing the entry threshold of AAL Systems: Preliminary results, ICCHP 2012.
Automated function based on probability estimation
Detection of accidents such as falls or deviations in activities
Life- or Health-critical accidents have to be processed immediately

23. Contribution to Safety / Security
Leitner et al.: The Combination of Evaluation methods in e-health, CHI Workshops, 2009.
Leitner et al.: Decision support in the smart home, Recsys Workshops, 2011.
Work in Progress: Cooperation with Chitra Ayuningtyas
Analysis of activity patterns
Incident detection, e.g. burglary
Simple indicators of crime by time of day
Felson & Poulson

24. Contributions to Energy / Environmentalism
Work in Progress Prototype – Developed in Cooperation
with Graz University of Technology
different possibilities.
Smart Homes can positively influence energy usage by:
Providing adequate and frequent feedback
Providing the possibility for interventions
Recommending behavioral changes
Fercher et al: Raising Awareness of Energy Consumption in Smart Living Environments, Proceedings of IE09.
Leitner et al. Decision support in the smart home, Recsys Workshops 2011.
Felfernig et al. Persuasion in Knowlegde Based Recommendation, Proceedings of Persuasive, 2008.
Energy Consumption
Feedback

25. Contributions Summary
different possibilities.
The focus of this presentation was to show how a Human Computer
Interaction perspective can enhance the development of Smart Homes.
An interdisciplinary approach based on interoperable technologies enables
ethnographic research to achieve results with a high ecological validity.
A basic platform has been established and, in contrast to similar research
projects, is up and running under real world conditions for almost two years.
Unobtrusive ethnographic observation methods enable the collection of
meaningful data building the basis of further research activities.
A combination of methods allows for the identification of psychological,
sociological and social aspects influencing the access to technology in
general and smart home technology in particular. For example, significant
gender differences could be observed within Casa Vecchia.

26. What constitutes the home of the future?
different possibilities.
Smart Homes are not adaptive or flexible:
The WISE home adapts to the needs of its inhabitants, by enabling, e.g:
- Multimodal interaction
- Spontaneous interruption of automated procedures
(such as cruise control in a car)
- Interoperability of devices from different manufactures
- Learning of patterns of daily activities
- Consideration of changing life circumstances and stages of life
 So that we come closer to the goal that interaction with and within the
home is “as refreshing, as a walk in the woods”. (Weiser, 1991)

27. Bibliography
different possibilities.
Bush Zitat: Cristopher P. Nemeth Human Factors Methods for Design: Making Systems Human-
centered, Foreword.
Brush, A.J. B. , Jung, J. Mahajan, R. Scott J. m-HomeLab: Shared Infrastructure for Home
Technology Field Studies, UbiComp, September 5-8, 2012.
Holloway, S., Julien, C.: The case for end-user programming of ubiquitous computing environments.
Proceedings of the FSE/SDP workshop on Future of software engineering research (FoSER). pp
167–172. (2010)
Davidoff, S., Lee, M.K., Yiu, C., Zimmerman, J., Dey, A.K.: Principles of Smart Home Control.
Ubicomp, Springer, Orange County, CA, pp. 19–34. (2006)
Eurostat Yearbook (2010) http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/
ITY_OFFPUB/KS-CD-11-001/EN/KS-CD-11-001-EN.PDF
Rode, J. A., Toye, E. F., Blackwell, A. F. (2004): The fuzzy felt ethnography?
Understanding the programming patterns of domestic appliances. Personal Ubiq. Computi. 8, 3-4,
pp. 161-176.
Iachello, G., Truong, K.N., Abowd, G.D., Hayes, G.R., Stevens, M. (2006): Experience prototyping
and sampling to evaluate ubicomp privacy in the real world, Proceedings of CHI06, pp. 1009-1018.
Weiser, M. (1991). The computer for the 21st century. Scientific american, 265(3), 94-104.