User Interfaces for AAL: How Can I Satisfy All Users?

Research and industry have explored home control and smart environments and their potentials for years. Despite of the perceived success in the form of prototypical systems and show homes, there has been relatively little impact on the mainstream market and personal homes of the consumers. In this paper, we will look at the current market situation on remote user interfaces for the home environment. Hereby we will focus on four requirements that such user interfaces and their systems should meet: coherence, task-orientation, scalability and accessibility. We introduce two open standardization efforts that are currently underway and that have the potential to deliver a new generation of remote user interfaces to a broad customer base, while facilitating the desired characteristics. Finally, we describe our efforts in moving this technology to the market. Important steps include the creation of a European eco system for our technology.