Mobile Interfaces for Better Living: Supporting Awareness in a Smart Home Environment

This paper describes efforts toward creating an integrated living space to support heightened awareness of a user’s environment. The work seeks to balance the needs and desires of an individual with those of other people within the locality, community, and world, to include basic comforts like temperature and humidity of a living environment as well as use of resources like power and water. The use of mobile technologies—already prominent among many populations—can be used to raise awareness of the needs and responsibilities of the individual and can highlight opportunities to live in ways that are friendlier to others. Mobile technologies have great promise in connecting users to their environment, and a smart environment enhanced with technology that supports better living can improve the lives of individuals, groups, and the broader community. The goals of this work are toward encouraging: 1) increased awareness of information in the user’s surroundings; 2) integrated control over factors in one’s surrounding and home environments; and 3) increased ability to support sustainable living for both individuals and groups. This work builds on the many smart, green, and sustainable living environment initiatives that have emerged in recent years.