An Accessible Smart Home Based on Integrated Multimodal Interaction

Our homes are becoming increasingly sensorized and smarter. However, they are also becoming increasingly complex, making accessing them and their advantages difficult. Assistants have the potential for improving the accessibility of smart homes, by providing everyone with an integrated, natural, and multimodal way of interacting with the home’s ecosystem. To demonstrate this potential and contribute to more environmentally friendly homes, in the scope of the project Smart Green Homes, a home assistant highly integrated with an ICT (Information and communications technology) home infrastructure was developed, deployed in a demonstrator, and evaluated by seventy users. The users’ global impression of our home assistant is in general positive, with 61% of the participants rating it as good or excellent overall and 51% being likely or very likely to recommend it to others. Moreover, most think that the assistant enhances interaction with the smart home’s multiple devices and is easy to use by everyone. These results show that a home assistant providing an integrated view of a smart home, through natural, multimodal, and adaptive interaction, is a suitable solution for enhancing the accessibility of smart homes and thus contributing to a better living ambient for all of their inhabitants.