Smart home control through unwitting trigger-action programming

Abstract

This paper describes ImAtHome, an iOS application for smart home configuration and management. This application has been built over the framework HomeKit, made available in iOS, for communicating with and controlling home automation accessories. Attention has been put on the design of the interaction with such an application, in order to make the interaction style as much coherent as possible with iOS apps and supporting users without programming skills to unwittingly create event-conditionaction rules that, in other similar systems, are usually defined through "if-then" constructs. The results of a user test demonstrate that ImAtHome is easy to use and well accepted by end users of different age and background.