An accessible control application for domotic environments

Abstract

In a future of smart, intelligent houses where multiple heterogeneous devices will be interconnected to provide new functionalities, to enhance user productivity and to ease everyday tasks, several issues will challenge the research community, including interoperability, communication, security, hardware and interfaces. The biggest challenge will probably be maintaining the focus on the user as the ultimate target of this intense research effort. The work presented in this paper, although in a small scenario, tries to maintain the user centrality in ambient intelligence by assisting people affected by degenerative diseases such as the Motor Neuron Disease in their everyday life at home. In particular, the paper proposes an eye/head-driven application that allows to control a domotic home through an almost-standard, already existing, house gateway. The ability to follow the user through all the stages of the disease, the adoption of low cost cameras for the tracking and the ability to easily control heterogeneous devices with a single "high-level" access point are the main innovation points. © 2006 Springer-Verlag France, Paris.