Exploring the Potential of Combining Smart Glasses and Consumer-grade EEG/EMG Headsets for Controlling IoT Appliances in the Smart Home

The number of smart home appliances that can be connected to the Internet grows every day. In this paper, we explore the potential of combining two emerging head-mounted interaction devices for intuitive control of these devices. Smart glasses are used to detect the object the user wants to control, and an EEG/EMG headset is used for triggering commands to the object of interest. We discuss the research and implementation challenges of identifying devices having the users visual attention and of mapping EEG/EMG headset output to device instructions. By exploiting the user context, we improve the responsiveness and precision of the user intent detection. Despite the enthusiastic reactions of the participants in a small user study, we have learned that the consumer-grade headsets available today present many shortcomings.