Developing Smart Homes Using the Internet of Things: How to demonstrate Your System

The Internet of Things (IoT) currently grows with great momentum offering the potential of virtually endless opportunities for new applications and services in the “Smart Home” context. Yet, regardless of the tremendous efforts made by the relevant research & development community, application development is still a very complex and error prone process as the large range of IoT devices and smart appliances often result to complex systems-of-systems interactions. In addition, we need to factor in the human behavior and interaction goals thus making it more difficult to understand and analyzing the operating principles of the new applications. It is therefore imperative to conduct experiments verifying the complex interactions of those systems, as well as to be able to demonstrate and showcase them; to give users clear evidence how the system around them will behave. In this work we present two demonstrators that we have developed during the past years in order to provide a generic environment for showcasing new applications and services in a “Smart Home” context. We have displayed these demonstrators at several occasions, which gave us numerous opportunities to receive feedback from spectators of different backgrounds. We discuss the design choices of each demonstrator, the benefits of each approach and the experience gained from each one.