PERSEO: A system to Personalize smart Environments through Smartphones, sEnsors and media Objects

Smartphones have a great potential as tools to adapt daily living spaces to the specific needs of its inhabitants. These devices usually host selected content, personal information and useful applications for their users, apart from continuously gath- ering their context data and preferences. Taking this fact as starting point, this paper describes PERSEO, a system that imple- ments a mobile-instrumented interaction concept to personalize the smart space by using a network of presence sensors and media objects. PERSEO is device-centric and relies on physical interaction. This means that on touch, grasp or proximity with any of the trigger objects in the presence network (e.g. NFC or Bluetooth enabled devices), the smartphone seamlessly transfers contents or application control to the available (media) objects, in order to improve the user experience. The transfer actions are governed by an event-condition-action logic that may be customized by the user in the smartphone. Actions depend on the iden- tification of the foreground applications running in the smartphone hosting PERSEO's logic. To enable the interaction concept, it has been necessary to design and implement a custom Digital Media Controller based on REST interfaces compatible with DLNA standard for media streaming. The paper explains the interaction flows and details the architecture components through an Android-based mobile prototype working in a smart living room. The system performance has been positively evaluated in terms of response time. Additionally, a group of users have tried PERSEO and favorably informed about this mobile-object instrumented personalization approach.