Visualisation of Ubiquitous Home Devices and Services

The home is becoming more embedded with wireless technologies and digital services. For example, machine-to-machine solutions for utility billing and management are now possible using cellular networks. With many homes now supporting different communication capabilities it has become relatively easy to deploy ubiquitous devices (sensors) and services for any number of different applications. This is already practical where probing the home network often uncovers services not necessarily known beforehand, i.e. universal plug-n-play devices like cable modems provide passive interactive services. Invisible services like these are set to accelerate as more networked devices form part of the home itself. Consequently, there will be a need to visualise available devices or services in order to allow users to better exploit the functions they provide. In this paper we embark on such an approach whereby a visualisation tool is placed over home networks to help achieve this. In this way devices can be seen irrespective of how invisible technology becomes, providing better exploitation of the services they provide. A successful case study is presented to demonstrate the applicability of our approach.