Everyday objects for end-user IoT coordination

Abstract

Recent advancements in IoT technology have made the concept of a smart environment more achievable, yet, the current usage of IoT devices remains rudimentary. To make IoT devices truly `smart’, they need to be coordinated with appropriate context. However, existing coordination tools are limited in their ability to cover diverse user needs for contexts, and capturing new context and transcribing it to a usable form is nearly impossible task for end-users. To overcome these challenges, this dissertation proposes a novel end-user IoT coordination approach that utilizes everyday objects as contextual triggers for IoT devices.

An ideation workshop study was conducted to establish an empirical foundation for the proposed IoT coordination approach. A total of 97 IoT coordination cases involving everyday objects were collected and analyzed, resulting in an understanding of preferences and beneficiary situations for utilizing everyday objects. In addition, a scenario movie, `A Day in Peter's Life', was showcased to further exlore and illustrate the smart environment enabled by everyday objects and demonstrate how the proposed IoT coordination approach can be refined and conceptualized. An exemplary IoT coordination system, `e-Rings,' was designed and developed to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the research proposition. The `e-Rings' system consists of a wearable watch-with-ring device that reads RFID tags attached to everyday objects and recognize the user's gestures on objects. The system was evaluated in an office workspace to investigate the actual user experience of the proposed IoT coordination approach. Last, the dissertation presents a conceptual prototype, `e-Circles,' which combines technically feasible and affordable options to reflect the recommendations to overcome the limitations and considerations for future capabilities of the proposed IoT coordination approach.

The contributions of this dissertation lie in the exploration and investigation of the potential role of everyday objects in future smart environments by multilateral ways. It presents a new perspective on the integration of non-digital artifacts into IoT ecosystems, supported by empirical evidence from the studies conducted, demonstrating its potential and values for improving the user experience in smart environments.