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This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Rittenbruch, Markus& Donovan, Jared (2019) Direct end-user interaction with and through IoT devices. In Roe, P, Soro, A, & Brereton, M (Eds.) Social Internet of Things (Internet of Things). Springer, Switzerland, pp. 143-165. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/119468/ c Consult author(s) regarding copyright matters This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94659-7_8 Direct end-user interaction with and through IoT devices Markus Rittenbruch, Jared Donovan QUT Design Lab, School of Design Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia { m.rittenbruch, j.donovan, }@qut.edu.au Abstract. Research addressing the Internet of Things (IoT) has been predominantly concerned with the interconnection of physical devices. However, increasingly complex application scenar- ios require us to further investigate the interface between IoT devices and users. In this book chapter, we explore the possibilities of direct end-user interaction with and through IoT devices. We do this by examining the increasing automation of environmental factors, such as tempera- ture and lighting, in open-office environments. Increasing automation offers many benefits around responsiveness of buildings to environmental conditions and improved energy efficiency, but can result in a reduction in office inhabitants’ options for manual control of their environ- ment. To inquire into this issue, we designed and evaluated an IoT device called the MiniOrb. The device employs tangible and ambient interaction and feedback mechanisms to support office environment inhabitants in maintaining awareness about environmental conditions. It reports on their subjective perceptions and opinions around comfort levels in the office and receives feed- back on how their individual preferences compare with their colleagues’. A mobile-device based version of the application was also created. Employing screen and touch interactions, this version of the interface enables users to access the same information as the tangible device, but with dif- ferent degrees of input precision and ambient interaction. We describe the design of the system along with the results of a trial of the device with real users, including a post-trial interview. The results shed light on how IoT devices can support direct end-user interaction by combining am- bient and tangible interaction approaches. Such devices can mediate the interpretation of sensed data by end-users, as well as help collect crowd-sourced data that directly relate to sensed data. Keywords: End-user interaction, Ambient interface, Tangible interaction, Indoor Climate, Individual Control, Peripheral awareness, Social IoT, Crowdsourcing 1 Introduction The increasingly widespread application of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in domains such as medical applications, intelligent transport and smart cities, has led to a greater awareness of the sociotechnical implications of this technology that transcend technical questions of interconnectivity, protocols and device de- sign. For instance, smart city applications touch on different usage contexts, in- volving people across multiple layers of urban development (e.g. waste, road in- frastructure, lighting etc.). While there is increasing awareness of this fact we propose that there still is a disconnect between the design of IoT devices and pro- 2 tocols on the one hand and complex application scenarios in the other hand. One of the pressing questions when considering different application scenarios is how and what level of abstraction IoT devices and networks is needed to support direct interactivity with end-users. In this chapter, we consider the notion of direct end- user interaction with and through IoT technologies. Considering end-user interac- tion with and through IoT devices offers a number of unique perspectives that are currently under-explored in the literature: • How can end-users be enabled to directly interact with individual sensors or sensor arrays? • How can interactive IoT devices help end-users to make sense of data? • How can we design ways for end-users to qualify sensor results and share that interpretation with other users? We explore these questions in the context of Home and Office automation, one the most prevalent application scenarios currently being discussed in the context of the IoT. In office environments in particular, the use of embedded smart sensors is well advanced. In order to efficiently control indoor climate in modern office buildings environmental monitoring technologies have been tightly integrated with building control mechanisms. Building management systems (BMS) are common- ly used to orchestrate large numbers of sensors to monitor environmental condi- tions and control temperature, humidity, lights and blinds accordingly. The aim of such systems is to make buildings more responsive to dynamic envi- ronmental conditions and thus more comfortable ‘on average’ for their inhabitants. However, even if they draw on localised sensor inputs to give a more complete picture of environmental conditions across a building, they still generally rely on centralised control systems. This means that individual inhabitants’ preferences are not met, either because those preferences happen to be different from an ideal- ised ‘average user’ or because relevant local environmental conditions are not available to the system. This is a particular issue for open plan office environ- ments shared by large numbers of inhabitants, each with individual preferences. The resulting lack of inhabitant’s control over their environment mirrors common concerns levelled at IoT scenarios, in particular questions around privacy and the locus of control. In our research we aim to address this problem by contributing to the design of systems which allow people in open-plan office environments to control the con- ditions of their indoor climate. Additionally, we seek to support inhabitants in communicating their preferences with others so that an overall consensus can be reached around desired indoor climate conditions. It is worth clarifying that we do not seek to take the extra step of using this information on desired environmental conditions to actually change the functioning of environmental control systems. Doing so presents a number of significant integration challenges with both tech- nical and social dimensions. It is a ‘wicked problem’, consisting of many inter- connected challenges and an extended research programme will be required to ad- dress these challenges in full. Although we see the work presented here as contributing a valuable first step in this programme of research, the larger chal- 3 lenges of integrating with functioning environmental control systems is beyond the scope of the study. Our focus in this paper is to explore a range of potential interaction mechanisms, feedback modalities, and personal input techniques, that could be employed by such systems. We have designed, implemented and conducted an initial evaluation of a system which explores these principles. The system allows users to provide feedback about their subjective impressions of comfort in an office environment for a several salient environmental factors. It employs both tangible and ambient modes of input and output and also provides for the display of data sensed by the system and an aggregated representation of group preferences. Our system is made up of the following three parts: 1) a local Sensor Platform, which is placed near users’ work area and gathers local measurements of humidi- ty, light, temperature, and noise levels; 2) MiniOrb: a small tangible and ambient interaction device, which displays the local environmental conditions as sensed by the local sensor platform and allows the user to submit their preferences in relation to these; and 3) MobiOrb: a mobile application, which implements an alternative interface for displaying sensor information and allows users to input preferences through touch-screen interactions as more precise values. The purpose of this chapter is to address two pertinent questions related to end- user interaction with IoT devices. Firstly, how might tangible and ambient interac- tion techniques be used to support people in reflecting on and recording subjective preferences in relation to comfort levels in an office setting, and secondly how ef- fective are these techniques compared to more conventional screen-based touch- interactions for setting the