Empowering End Users to Customize their Smart Environments

What is it about?

Research on the Internet of Things (IoT) has devoted many efforts to technological aspects. Little social and practical benefits have emerged so far. IoT devices, so-called smart objects, are becoming even more pervasive and social, leading to the need to provide non-technical users with innovative interaction strategies for controlling their behavior. This work proposes interaction mechanisms to program the behavior of smart objects. Such mechanisms are based on a model that drives the programming of smart objects by defining event-condition-action rules.

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Why is it important?

The proposed interaction mechanisms: -have been designed by involving a sample of end-users; -fit the mental model of users without technical skills in programming or computer science -have been compared during a controlled experiment to assess their usability The article discusses some design implications that came out from the performed studies and presents the architecture of a platform supporting rule definition and execution.