Customizing smart environments: A tabletop approach

Smart environments are becoming a reality in our society and the number of intelligent devices integrated in these spaces is increasing very rapidly. As the combination of intelligent elements will open a wide range of new opportunities to make our lives easier, final users should be provided with a simplified method of handling complex intelligent features. Specifying behavior in these environments can be difficult for non-experts, so that more efforts should be directed towards easing the customization tasks. This work presents an entirely visual rule editor based on dataflow expressions for interactive tabletops which allows behavior to be specified in smart environments. An experiment was carried out aimed at evaluating the usability of the editor in terms of non-programmers’ understanding of the abstractions and concepts involved in the rule model, ease of use of the proposed visual interface and the suitability of the interaction mechanisms implemented in the editing tool. The study revealed that users with no previous programming experience were able to master the proposed rule model and editing tool for specifying behavior in the context of a smart home, even though some minor usability issues were detected.