Aca-article; Thingies for Dummies - A smart home infrastructure for the rest of us

In this paper, the authors introduce an infrastructure that enables end-users to bring simple smart home devices into their homes and install them. The infrastructure makes use of equipment already present in many homes – Wi-Fi networks and smartphones – and is based on common web technologies.

Authors: David Thomas, Egil Hansen, both IT University of Copenhagen

Published in: undisclosed.

ABSTRACT- A number of smart home infrastructures and technologies exist. However, these are not commonly adopted by homeowners as they are often too expensive, complex and difficult to retrofit in existing homes. We introduce an infrastructure that enables end-users to bring simple smart home devices into their homes and install them. Our infrastructure makes use of equipment already present in many homes – Wi-Fi networks and smartphones – and is based on common web technologies. We include a bootstrapping process to connect UI-less devices to Wi-Fi networks, and an approach to generate user interfaces for these devices. We have evaluated our designed infrastructure via a user test of an implemented prototype, and our evaluation participants found the prototype easy to install and use overall.

Access paper, open access: https://blog.itu.dk/SPCL-F2012/files/2012/06/5thingiesfordummies.pdf