A generic user interface for energy management in smart homes

Building operating systems play an important role in monitoring energy consumption of devices and improving energy efficiency in household buildings. From this arises a need for a preferably flexible and full-featured user interface to visualize the energy data in the building and allow residents to collect and realize various needs and preferences to the system. This article introduces a generic user interface for building operating systems which is presented from aspects of design, implementation and evaluation. To ensure the user interface can be flexibly adapted to various types of buildings, we design a series of generic data models which are independent of any building operating system. Besides, three roles with different permissions and a number of functional components of the user interface are also introduced in the article. Based on the design, a prototype of such a generic user interface named Building Operating System User Interface (BOS UI) has been implemented to operate the Energy Smart Home Lab (ESHL) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). We evaluate the design, functionality and usability of the BOS UI qualitatively and quantitatively. The evaluation results show that the BOS UI meets a set of desired requirements (except for system configuration) for a generic user interface of building operating systems. Besides this, the evaluation experiments yielded very positive feedback in many aspects including improvement of energy efficiency and user experience. More than 90% of the test users agreed that the BOS UI provided them with enough information and functionalities that they would need in their daily lives and it can help them to save money. Furthermore, the mean score of the System Usability Scale (SUS) is 79.0, which indicates a good usability. The experiments prove that the user interface is still easy to use, despite abundant features are integrated into the system.

[1]  Hartmut Schmeck,et al.  Organic smart home: architecture for energy management in intelligent buildings , 2011, OC '11.

[2]  Andreas Holzinger,et al.  Usability engineering methods for software developers , 2005, CACM.

[3]  J. B. Brooke,et al.  SUS: a retrospective , 2013 .

[4]  Bernard Lefebvre,et al.  Ontology-Based Management of the Telehealth Smart Home, Dedicated to Elderly in Loss of Cognitive Autonomy , 2007, OWLED.

[5]  Rex Hartson,et al.  The UX book, process and guidelines for ensuring a quality user experience by Rex Hartson and Pardha S. Pyla , 2012, SOEN.

[6]  John Zimmerman,et al.  Principles of Smart Home Control , 2006, UbiComp.

[7]  Luis Pérez-Lombard,et al.  A review on buildings energy consumption information , 2008 .

[8]  Richard Harper,et al.  Inside the Smart Home , 2003, Springer London.

[9]  Bruce Manciagli,et al.  Human Centered Design , 2011, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[10]  Ravi S. Sandhu,et al.  Role-Based Access Control Models , 1996, Computer.

[11]  Hartmut Schmeck,et al.  Organic Computing - A New Vision for Distributed Embedded Systems , 2005, ISORC.

[12]  Ben Frain.  Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 , 2012 .

[13]  Sevastianos Mirasgedis,et al.  European residential buildings and empirical assessment of the Hellenic building stock, energy consumption, emissions and potential energy savings , 2007 .

[14]  Egbert Schlungbaum,et al.  Automatic User Interface Generation from Declarative Models , 1996, CADUI.

[15]  Alexander Lazovik,et al.  Creating personal, social and urban awareness through pervasive computing , 2013 .

[16]  Charlie Wilson,et al.  Smart homes and their users: a systematic analysis and key challenges , 2014, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[17]  Hartmut Schmeck,et al.  User interaction interface for Energy Management in Smart Homes , 2012, 2012 IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT).

[18]  Krzysztof Gajowniczek,et al.  SMART METERING AND DATA PRIVACY ISSUES , 2013 .

[19]  H. Ruser,et al.  3D virtual "smart home" user interface , 2002, 2002 IEEE International Symposium on Virtual and Intelligent Measurement Systems (IEEE Cat. No.02EX545).

[20]  Ingmar Baumgart,et al.  SMART-ER: Peer-based privacy for smart metering , 2014, 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS).

[21]  Philip T. Kortum,et al.  Determining what individual SUS scores mean: adding an adjective rating scale , 2009 .

[22]  Birger Becker,et al.  Shifting Electricity Demand with Smart Home Technologies , 2011 .

[23]  James T. Miller,et al.  An Empirical Evaluation of the System Usability Scale , 2008, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[24]  Prashant J. Shenoy,et al.  Private memoirs of a smart meter , 2010, BuildSys '10.

[25]  Wilbert O. Galitz,et al.  The Essential Guide to User Interface Design: An Introduction to GUI Design Principles and Techniques , 1996 .

[26]  J E Rowley.  Evaluation of software , 1992, TC.

[27]  Stefan Saroiu,et al.  An Operating System for the Home , 2012, NSDI.

[28]  Hartmut Schmeck,et al.  State-of-the-art user interfaces for building operating systems , 2017, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid and Smart Cities (ICSGSC).

[29]  Hartmut Schmeck,et al.  Adaptive building energy management with multiple commodities and flexible evolutionary optimization , 2016 .

[30]  Nigel Bevan,et al.  Extending Quality in Use to Provide a Framework for Usability Measurement , 2009, HCI.

[31]  Sahin Albayrak,et al.  A meta user interface to control multimodal interaction in smart environments , 2009, IUI.

[32]  Roger Orpwood,et al.  The design of smart homes for people with dementia—user-interface aspects , 2005, Universal Access in the Information Society.

[33]  Andrew Dillon,et al.  The Evaluation of software usability , 2001 .

[34]  A. Ghasemi,et al.  Normality Tests for Statistical Analysis: A Guide for Non-Statisticians , 2012, International journal of endocrinology and metabolism.