Point-n-Press: An Intelligent Universal Remote Control System for Home Appliances

Abstract

With numerous connected devices and appliances, the smart home is one of the representative fields of Internet of Things (IoT). As the complexity of devices/appliances increase, numerous buttons (sometimes dozens) are designed on the remote controller in home spaces even if several of them are seldom used. A user may be confused with the controller even if he or she only intends to perform a simple operation. This confusion also leads to a higher probability of mal-operations. In addition, conventional methods of communication between remote controllers and connected devices, such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML) messages, are usually bandwidth-consumptive. To address these problems, an intelligent universal remote control system for home appliances named Point-n-Press is proposed. Point-n-Press addresses the directionality feature, which enables easy and intuitive control by pointing to the target device to display the target's control interface on the screen of the remote controller. By leveraging the state dependencies of home device/appliance operations, only functional buttons that are relevant to the current context are utilized. Two real prototypes are implemented to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme. The evaluation results show that Point-n-Press is a useful and suitable control scheme for IoT-based smart homes.