Interaction Design Issues in Smart Home Environments

The advancement of technologies allowed us to provide and access huge amount of information and services anytime, anywhere, and to realize smart home environment. Major challenges include retrieving and perceiving information, sustaining attention to information, and maintaining awareness of changes in information in an unobtrusive manner. In this paper, we describe the design issues of interaction in a system that address the challenges. The system shows information related to a user's current task, in which a user's context is recognized through the state of usage of sensor augmented daily objects, and given to a system as an input. We show a basic model of the interaction, i.e. implicit interaction, and discuss the implications for the design based on four studies.