eLite

 This thesis is currently not available: it has been assigned to Daniele Autuori.

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach to achieve intelligence comparable to fully-fledged Smart Homes, at a fraction of the cost, by exploiting available technology and by providing solutions that may be deployed even today. However, by adopting such environments, home inhabitants risk to lose control of their homes (i.e., they might be forced to modify their home-related behavior).

In this context, a suitable trade-off between totally direct user control and fully automatic home behaviors needs to be found. A relatively accepted approach to minimize this trade-off is based on activity delegation, i.e., explicit delegation of tasks to the home, by means of rule-definition.

A promising interface for visual rule definition has already been proposed in a previous paper (A User-Friendly Interface for Rules Composition in Intelligent Environments), and a web-based prototype interface has been developed in PHP with Ajax technologies in a previous thesis. However, web-based interaction turns out to be too complex and in-house displays should be based on more modern (i.e., touch-based) interfaces.

The purpose of this work is to design, develop and validate an Android-based mobile application for defining and creating domotic rules. The user interface should explore all the possibilities offered by touch-screen interaction, by remaining as simple and efficient as possible. The outcome of the work will be validated by means of a user study and, if satisfying, will be made available as an Open Source project.