Smart Thermostat

In this project the aim was to combine different smart home systems that incorporated rich interaction principles and use the data to develop emerging functionality that was only possible when these systems are interconnected. My part of the home system was the interior climate system for a family home.

This study assignment was part of the CRIGS (Connecting Rich Interaction in Growing Systems) project. Our systems were supposed to be interactive in a rich way, making use of user's capabilities in a broader way than letting them push touch screens.

to quickly validate our assumptions we build a miniture home and developed personas for each member of the family. We build miniature variants of our system and acted out different scenarios of the lives of the family using our system.

Within this group I focussed on the interior climate system. I made a set of radiator thermostats (RTs) that would communicate with a distributed in each room. Based on machine learning it would understand when to turn on and off. It would take into account room presence. Through each RT the user would be able to set the temperature in each room.

I explored rich interaction by adding a motor and pressure sensitive button in each RT. As research shows that men and women usually have different preferences of ambient temperature, I thought it would be interesting to be able to feel and indicate how badly you want to keep the temperature on your desired setting. Turning the knob would change the temperature (readible from the display). Based on how hard the pressure sensitive button would be pressed the system would capture your desire to keep your setting. Then the next time someone would turn the knob, force feedback would make it heavier to turn the knob indicating the strong desire from your roommate not to change it. Based on this haptic information the user could make an informed decision to either keep the temperature or change it slidely.

Images

Reflection

The project taught me a great deal about how the addition of smart devices can minimally increase someone's quality of life. This realization led me to believe that pursuing a career in this product category might not be as fulfilling as I had hoped.

Apart from that, I thoroughly enjoyed exploring rich interaction as a framework to create engaging and soothing interactions. This project was the first time I ventured into self-teaching 3D modeling software, allowing me to 3D print my design and incorporate a significant amount of technology in a sophisticated manner, given my skill level at the time.