Home Media Centre Smart Interface

Home Media CentreSmart Interface

Demonstration

School of Information TechnologiesUniversity of Sydney

Research Problem

• Develop an application to– Control a smart environment from a mobile

device– Deliver personalised services to the user

• Design and implement a smart environment for the Home Media Centre

• Control a smart environment from an external location

Motivation – Homer’s Smart Lounge Room

• Homer’s Dream of a perfect lounge room– Wants to be able to control everything from a single

remote– Wants his lounge room to remember what he likes

and how he likes it

• Homer wants to watch the baseball final but is out and can’t watch it. Homer has two options– Send an SMS to his Smart Lounge Room to tell it to

record the final– Homer regularly watches the baseball and assumes

his lounge room will automatically record it for him

Background

• Some work done on controlling Home Media Centres with phones

• Various methods of connectivity used

• Limited research on controlling other aspects of the environment

• Not much work on personalisation of Home Media Centres

Research Contributions

• Demonstrated the use of a mobile phone as an interface for controlling a home media environment

• Demonstrated the delivery of personalised environmental settings

• Demonstrated the use of SMS to control an environment from an external location

ArchitectureSoundSystem

Phone

TV

LightsB

lue

too

th S

erv

er

SM

S S

erv

er

Personalization System

Elvin Router

Fre

evo

X1

0 C

on

tro

ller

Environment

Environment Controller

Freevo

• Used to record and play television programs

• Modified to send Elvin messages to environment on events that have occurred

• Listens for Elvin messages from the interface (phone), SMS, and personalisation

X10 Controllers

• Listens for Elvin messages and executes the appropriate commands on the environment

• Devices controlled using the electrical circuit they are connected to

• HeyU application was used to handle the signalling of controllers through the electrical circuit.

Smart Interface (Phone)

• Developed a Java Application to run on a Nokia 6600

• Application had customized controls to the environmental elements

• User commands were sent from the phone to the central server via Bluetooth

• Central server forwarded all commands received from the phone as Elvin messages to other environmental components

SMS

• SMS Handler

• SMS Listener

• Gnokii

• SMS Grammar[1] message = command channel [program] [date] time[2] command = “record”[3] channel = The TV channel[4] program = program_name[5] date = “today” | “tomorrow” | dd/mm/yyyy[6] time = start-end | start+duration[7] start = start time, 4 digits[8] end = end time, 4 digits[9] duration = duration, 4 digits

Personalisation

• The personalisation module provides three functions– Record programs most often recorded by

users– Recommend programs recorded by similar

users– Apply light and sound settings corresponding

to a recorded program

Demonstration ofImplementation

Navigating Freevo

Menu Left

Menu Up

Menu Down

Menu Right

Menu Select

Controlling Lights

Lights OnLights Off

To dim lights select number between 0 and 23 then press lights on/lights off

Watching TV

Stop

SMS

Example Message Format:

record 10 Simpsons today 1800-1830

Personalisation

Evaluation

• Evaluated on 5 users

• Tasks involved using the phone interface to navigate Freevo menus, control the lights and sounds, and send an SMS

• All users successfully completed the tasks and within a reasonable time

• Feedback generally positive

Future Work

• Scrutability for the assumptions made about the user’s environment preferences

• General extension of the personalisation function supported

• Introduction of additional applications and devices that the interface can control

• Introduction of the notion of identity and presence through the use of device ID and X10 motion sensors in the environment

Conclusion

• Successfully demonstrated the use of a Mobile phone in controlling the Home Media Centre

• Successfully demonstrated providing a personalised environment to the user

• User evaluations found the interface to be appropriate

Questions