SmartX - Enabling traditional environmental control to use standard HCI

Abstract

Traditional Environmental Control (EC) systems mostly make use of remote control units. Due to that traditional Ecs a) are often stand alone products which are inflexible and hardly extendible b) can not use the flexibility and adaptability power of modern Human Computer Interfaces (HCI) what leads to accessibility and usability problems c) can not easily integrate functionalities like communication, context awareness, pervasive computing... In the project SmartX the functionalities of a traditional EC have been ported to a standard HCI interface. The purpose of this approach is to build the system on a stable and well known working environment to increase acceptance, usability, flexibility and adaptability and to integrate new functionalities mentioned above. In this paper the SmartX prototype will be presented. Actual work and future steps to improve the application of EC by improving its usability, by integrating it into other features of standard devices will be discussed. © Springer-Verlag 2004.