Towards Universally Usable Smart Homes – How Can MyUI, URC and openHAB Contribute to an Adaptive User Interface Platform?

The vision of the Smart Home carries high potential to support us in our daily life and makes it more comfortable. The benefits are relevant to all users including those with special needs like elderly people and people with disabilities. To provide the largest possible benefit to their user, Smart Homes have to adjust to the user and not vice versa. Thereby, it must be taken into account that the user group of the future Smart Home is quite heterogeneous, including users of all ages, different levels of familiarity with computers, and various forms and degrees of disabilities. Hence, universally usable user interfaces are a prerequisite for the success and acceptance of Smart Homes. This paper presents criteria for the provision of universal usability in Smart Homes, based on Schneiderman’s research agenda on universal usability for web and other services. Three established frameworks – MyUI, Universal Remote Console (URC) and openHAB – are examined as to how they can contribute to an adaptive user interface platform for Smart Homes. Three possible architectures will be presented on how the three frameworks can be integrated to achieve maximum benefit for the user. We finally propose to use the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) approach for accommodating personal user preferences in Smart Homes. Keywords–Adaptive User Interface; Abstract User Interface; Ambient Intelligence; Ambient Assisted Living (AAL); Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII); Smart Home; Universal Usability; Universal Remote Console (URC).

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