Direction-based Wireless Remote Controller: A Smartphone Application

Recently, smartphones have been used as remote controllers for home appliances through connectivity of mobile telecom network or Wi-Fi. To control several home appliances in a room, a mechanism is required for a smartphone to correctly select the target appliance. Through the built-in electronic compass function in the smartphone, we propose a scheme called Point-and-Control (PnC) that allows a user to select a home appliance by pointing the smartphone to that home appliance. In this paper, we design the PnC and show the performance of this solution. Our study indicates that the PnC can effectively achieve the remote control function.