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Programming IoT-Spaces: A User-Survey on Home Automation Rules

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Book cover Computational Science – ICCS 2021 (ICCS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12745))

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Abstract

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has transformed everyday manual tasks into digital and automatable ones, giving way to the birth of several end-user development solutions that attempt to ease the task of configuring and automating IoT systems without requiring prior technical knowledge. While some studies reflect on the automation rules that end-users choose to program into their spaces, they are limited by the number of devices and possible rules that the tool under study supports. There is a lack of systematic research on (1) the automation rules that users wish to configure on their homes, (2) the different ways users state their intents, and (3) the complexity of the rules themselves—without the limitations imposed by specific IoT devices systems and end-user development tools. This paper surveyed twenty participants about home automation rules given a standard house model and device’s list, without limiting their creativity and resulting automation complexity. We analyzed and systematized the collected 177 scenarios into seven different interaction categories, representing the most common smart home interactions.

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Notes

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  2. 2.

    The replication package of the user study can be found on Zenodo [29].

  3. 3.

    The replication package for the SmartLab can be found on Zenodo [7].

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Acknowledgement

This work is financed by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, within project UIDB/50014/2020.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering, DEI, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Danny Soares, João Pedro Dias, André Restivo & Hugo Sereno Ferreira

  2. INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal

    João Pedro Dias & Hugo Sereno Ferreira

  3. LIACC, Porto, Portugal

    André Restivo

Authors
  1. Danny Soares
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  2. João Pedro Dias
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  3. André Restivo
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  4. Hugo Sereno Ferreira
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to João Pedro Dias .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland

    Maciej Paszynski

  2. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany

    Dieter Kranzlmüller

  3. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Valeria V. Krzhizhanovskaya

  4. University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, USA

    Jack J. Dongarra

  5. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter M.A. Sloot

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Soares, D., Dias, J.P., Restivo, A., Ferreira, H.S. (2021). Programming IoT-Spaces: A User-Survey on Home Automation Rules. In: Paszynski, M., Kranzlmüller, D., Krzhizhanovskaya, V.V., Dongarra, J.J., Sloot, P.M. (eds) Computational Science – ICCS 2021. ICCS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12745. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77970-2_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77970-2_39

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