Media Service Mediation Supporting Resident's Collaboration in ubiTV

A smart home is an intelligent and shared space, where various services coexist and multiple residents with different preferences and habits share these services most of the time. Due to the sharing of space and time, service conflicts may occur when multiple users try to access media services. In this paper, we propose a context-based mediation method, consisting of service mediators and mobile mediators, to resolve the service conflicts in a smart home. The service mediators detect service conflicts among the residents and recommend their preferred media contents on a shared screen and their own mobile devices by exploiting users’ preferences and service profiles. The mobile mediators collect the recommendation information and give the users personal recommendation. With combination of the service and mobile mediator, the residents are allowed to negotiate the media contents in the conflict situation. Based on experiments in the ubiHome, we observed that mediation is useful to encourage discussion and helps to choose a proper service in a conflict situation. Therefore, we expect the proposed mediation method to play a vital role in resolving conflicts and providing multiple residents with harmonized services in a smart home environment.