<p>The accelerated development of mobile computational platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) has led to increase in interconnected products with sensors that are creating smart environments. The smart environment expands the interactive spaces from limited digital screens, such as desktops and phones, to a much broader category that includes everyday objects, smart things, surrounding contexts, robots, and humans. The improvement of personal computing devices including smartphones, watches, and AR glasses further broadens the communication bandwidth between us and the ambient intelligence from the surrounding environment. Additionally in this smart environment people want to pursue personalization and are motivated to design and build their own smart environments and author customized functions.</p> <p> </p> <p>My work in this thesis focuses on investigating workflows and methods to support end-users to create personalized interactive experiences within smart environments. In particular, I designed the authoring systems by inspecting different interaction modalities, namely the direct input, spatial movement, in-situ activity and embodied interactions between users and everyday objects, smart things, robots and virtual mid-air contents. To this end, we explored 1) the software tools, hardware modules, and machines that support users to augment non-smart environments with digital interfaces and functions, and 2) the intelligence and context-awareness powered by the smart environments that deliver automatic and assistance during living and entertaining experiences. In this thesis, I mainly studied the following authoring workflows and systems: 1) customizing interactive interfaces on ordinary objects by surface painted circuits, 2) constructing a spatially aware environment for service robots with IoT modules, 3) authoring robot and IoT applications that can be driven by body actions and daily activities and 4) creating interactive and responsive augmented reality applications and games that can be played through natural input modalities.</p> <p> </p> <p>Takeaways from the main body of the research indicate that the authoring systems greatly lower the barrier for end-users to understand, control, and modify the smart environments. We conclude that seamless, fluent, and intuitive authoring experiences are crucial for building harmonious human-AI symbiotic living environments.</p>

In today’s overloaded media landscape, television viewers are constantly confronted with the problem of what media content to select. This media overload speaks directly to the theory of bounded rationality when viewers work to understand all available choices. This thesis presents and evaluates an Internet of Things driven media recommendation concept (IoT TV) which could ease decision making for viewers by providing more personalized media content recommendations. This study evaluates the concept using three focus groups to understand what aspects of IoT TV are important for viewers. IoT TV concept addresses factors such as timing and emotions which influence a media choice extensively. The conducted thematic analysis identifies the four themes: time saving and passing, monitoring people and devices, media choice, and privacy. These themes are treated as the results of this study because the themes describe the important aspects which have to be considered before launching IoT TV. IoT TV will make media content selection easier by saving time and matching content according to emotions. Consequently, IoT TV connection with smart devices which share data about viewers’ time and emotions would solve the problem of media overload. / I dagens överbelastade medielandskap stöter tv-tittare ständigt på frågan om vilket medieinnehåll de ska välja. Denna medieöverbelastning väcker teorier om begränsad rationalitet när tittarna kämpar för att förstå alla tillgängliga valmöjligheter. Denna uppsats presenterar ett rekommendationskoncept för medier drivna av sakernas internet (IoT-tv), som skulle kunna underlätta tittarnas beslutsfattande genom att ge mer personaliserade medieinnehållsrekommendationer. Studien utvärderar konceptet genom tre fokusgrupper för att förstå vilka aspekter av IoT-tv som är viktiga för tittare. Konceptet IoT-tv tar i beaktande sådana faktorer som tajmning och känslor som kan påverka medievalet betydligt. Den utförda tematiska analysen pekar ut följande fyra teman: tidsbesparing och -passning, människo- och enhetsövervakning, medieval samt integritet. Dessa teman behandlas som studiens resultat eftersom de beskriver viktiga aspekter som bör beaktas innan IoT-tv lanseras. IoT-tv kommer att underlätta val av medieinnehåll genom att spara tid och synkronisera innehållet med aktuella känslor hos tittaren. Således skulle smarta tv-enheter med IoT-anslutning som delar data om tittarens tid och känslor, lösa problemet med medieöverbelastning.

Today more and more objects in our daily lives are getting connected to the Internet. This phenomenon is called the Internet of Things and is a way for physical things such as cars, buildings or even bus stations to get access and communicate with other objects using the Internet. The problem is that for every Internet of Things device, an application is often needed in order to communicate with these devices. Developing mobile applications in a separate programming language for each operating system can be an expensive and time consuming task. In this thesis, we implement and evaluate a cross-platform mobile solution for users to interact with smart things using the advantages of web technologies. To compare previous findings in this area, two literature reviews has been performed to find out which is the state of the art on cross-platform mobile development frameworks and smart-things technologies used for interacting with physical objects. The result is a mobile application developed using PhoneGap and jQuery Mobile that interacts with iBeacons, where students inside a university building can get directions and schedules for different rooms. The application received good results from a couple of usability studies, and performed well when measuring its performance. The outcome shows that web technologies that exist today are a viable solution to native mobile applications in terms of interacting with smart things such as tagging technologies.