Supporting end-user development of context-aware services in home network system

Abstract

The home network system (HNS, for short) provides value-added and context-aware services for home users, by orchestrating networked home appliances and sensors. Although the HNS services have been developed by system vendors, there exist strong needs that the end-users create their own services according to their convenience. This paper presents a novel service creation environment, called Sensor Service Binder (SSB), which provides a user-friendly interface for creating context-aware services within the HNS. Built on top of the service-oriented HNS, the SSB allows non-expert users to register contexts using the sensors, and to bind the registered context to any operation of the networked appliances. Experimental evaluation with an actual HNS showed that the effort for service creation was reduced to 10% by introducing the proposed SSB. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.