Implementing personal home controllers on smartphones for service-oriented home network

The human interface devices for the home network system (HNS) should be flexible enough to reflect individual preferences and lifestyles of home users. To fill the requirement, this paper presents a novel framework that enables Personal Home Controllers (PHC) on smartphones. The proposed framework is designed so that a user can freely design screen layouts with buttons and pictures, and can define favorite HNS operations on the layouts. The first part of our contribution is PHC Framework, which dynamically implements a PHC based on a given user definition. The second part is PHC Creater, a GUI application which supports the user to create the user definition. The proposed framework is implemented for Android mobile devices. We conduct an experimental evaluation, where subjects create PHCs for operating an actual HNS. The experimental result shows that every subject creates a unique PHC with his favorite motif, and that most subjects find usefulness and pleasure in creating their own PHCs.