A service infrastructure for human-centered IoT-based smart built environments

Abstract

Smart built environments enhanced with technology can improve the lives of individuals, groups, and the broader community. Internet of Things (IoT), a collection of networked and interacting embedded devices, could provide the necessary infrastructure and enabling technologies to design, develop and deploy smart built-environments. We describe an approach to modeling IoT-based smart built environments that uses a large-scale virtual environment where a building model is aligned with the physical space. This approach takes advantages of affordances and embodied cognition in a large physical space to model user interaction with built spaces. The built space contains ‘smart objects’ with embedded sensors/actuators/controllers (e.g., kitchen appliances). A ‘smart object’ has the corresponding virtual object in the virtual environment. We build on our work on the conceptual design of interaction middleware and context sensitive interaction interoperability frameworks to develop support for a living ecosystem of services, a service framework, to support interactions with a smart built-environment. We illustrate the proposed framework on a case study, a living lab for smart built-environments that includes a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, an office, and a bedroom.