TACTUS: An Intuitive and Tangible Framework for Composing IOT Services

Smart objects are around us, more than in the past, and their services are available for being used. Large scale consolidation and easy availability of the IoT paradigm, pervasive services, Cloud computing, lead us to face the challenge of effective interaction with emerging clusters of novel devices, capable of collaborating together in order to meet always changing users' needs. The problem that must be solved is how to meet the immense number of possible services offered by device collaboration, with the everyday users' needs, who could be untrained and lacking proper skills. Actual solutions are scattered, often solving vertical problems, and requiring some deal of training for properly usage. The absence of technical skill for end users is crucial, if we want to take advantage of their creativity and innate knowledge, so that new services may emerge, without any developers' limitation. It becomes fundamental to investigate how to communicate the new pervasive and powerful opportunities that those smart objects offer, and how to leverage fruition through device collaboration. In this paper we present our theoretical approach to empower common users with an interaction model for IoT services composition, capable to intuitively manage the complexity of smart devices deployed all around us. Then we propose a technological tool, based on the novel interaction paradigm, able to scale the fruition of self made solutions, so that the users can autonomously solve their special needs by simply adding functionalities to the services they receive. Following this evolutionary paradigm, self customization of IoT service composition, empowers users in creating always different services, fit for their unique contexts.