Intelligent Widgets for Intuitive Interaction and Coordination in Smart Home Environments

The intelligent home environment is a well-established example of the Ambient Intelligence application domain. A variety of sensors and actuators can be used to have the home environment adapt towards changing circumstances and user preferences. However, the complexity of how these intelligent home automation systems operate is often beyond the comprehension of non-technical users, and adding new technology to an existing infrastructure is often a burden. In this paper, we present a home automation framework designed based on smart widgets with a model driven methodology that raises the level of abstraction to configure home automation equipment. It aims to simplify user-level home automation management by mapping high-level home automation concepts onto a low-level composition and configuration of the automation building blocks with a reverse mapping to simplify the integration of new equipment into existing home automation systems. Experiments have shown that the mappings we proposed are sufficient to represent household appliances to the end user in a simple way and that new mappings can easily be added to our framework.