A Mobile Augmented Reality App for Creating, Controlling, Recommending Automations in Smart Homes

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Automations in the context of smart homes have been adopted more and more frequently; thus, users should be able to control them and create automations most suitable to their needs. Current solutions for this purpose are based on visual apps with conceptual representations of possible automation elements. However, they tend to be static, abstract, and detached from the user’s real context. In this paper, we propose a novel solution based on mobile augmented reality, which provides situated, dynamic representations associated with the physical objects available in the current users’ context while they are freely moving about. It allows direct interaction with the objects of interest, monitoring nearby objects' automations while moving, and creating new automations or modifying existing ones. It also supports users with recommendations of object and service configurations relevant to complete the editing of the new automations. The paper also reports on a user test, which provided positive feedback.