A User Interface for Controlling Information Appliances in Smart Homes

The web user interface offers many advantages; however, a fixed IP address is required to manage each server, it does not have a push function for completion or error messages, it suffers from problems associated with firewalls, and it is slow. To address these issues, we propose an efficient method for controlling information appliances in smart homes that uses a natural language processing technique and an instant messaging system (IMS). The proposed agent-based management system for smart homes provides a user-friendly interface, and can make use of add-on functionalities of the IMS such as voice chatting, SMS, and multimedia. Moreover, the proposed method can be applied using middleware technologies such as Jini [1] UPnP [2], OSGi [4], and HAVi [5].

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