Digital Signage in the Home

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DS is working its way into the home, on an open service platform.
 
The Next Generation Media project SerCHo (Service Centric Home) is one of the winning projects of a technology contest run by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. The main goal of the SerCHo project is the development of an open service platform that increases the quality of life in the home and revolutionises how people react with technology in their home by creating a holistic interactive home solution. The project focuses on information technology, broadcasting and entertainment, telecommunications and home automation, aiming for the creation of new and innovative solutions that integrate well into the existing environments, to enable the user to control a smart proactive home environment in a harmonised and intuitive manner.
 
At the DAI-Labor laboratory in Berlin, the concept of a Home Service Platform is investigated as a basis for the intelligent home of the future, where all the digital technology throughout the house will be integrated. The Home Service Platform provides simple services for contextual recognition and for the easiest integration of smart home appliances, to enable the basic infrastructure of the system to access and enhance external services, so that it is seamlessly integrated into the home environment, providing a consistent user interface for home control and automation.
 
This novel interface management will facilitate adaptive and terminal independent distribution of user interfaces in Smart Home Environments by combining single, isolated devices to aggregate an integrated complex consistent user interface. DAI-Labor are also developing a universal haptic remote control combining gesture recognition with graphical user interfaces.
 
Take the kitchen, for example. Cooking is one of the most basic daily activities which take place in the home, and has spawned numerous cookery television shows, cookery books and, more recently, web recipe databases. DAI-Labor have developed an interactive Smart Cooking Assistant which combines all of these available services to create a unique multimodal cooking experience, with many possibilities for the creation of further smart cooking services and kitchen appliance support services. The Cooking Assistant is primarily interacted with via a touchscreen installed in the kitchen, but it also supports other means of user interaction, including voice, gestures and mobile devices.
 
The Cooking Assistant is composed of a Recipe Finder and a Smart Cooking Aid, both hosted on the home server and accessible through any audio-visual terminal device. User interaction may be carried out through the touchscreen or through the voice interface, depending on which is more convenient – it’s rather difficult to crack eggs and touch a screen at the same time! The Recipe Finder has access to internal and external recipe databases, from where it can extract recipes for the user, taking into account user preferences, level of difficulty, ingredient supplies, cooking history, kitchen inventory, number of people dining, nutritional information and any other preferences specifically stated by the user.
 
The list of ingredients can be downloaded from the Cooking Assistant onto a mobile phone, so that the user can use their phone as a shopping list. The user can also add further ingredients to this list if they wish to purchase other things while they are shopping. This technology enables the distribution of the user interface to mobile devices via wireless internet.
 
In the Cooking Aid module, the recipe is presented to the user step by step, incorporating bidirectional multimodality. The cooking steps can be displayed on the touchscreen or read out to the user, and are further supported by video demonstrations of how to carry out each step. The Smart Cooking Aid also monitors and communicates with kitchen devices via the home server, so it can perform actions like preheating the oven or switching it off at the appropriate moment.
 
The scope for personalisation, multimodality, audio-video support, contextual awareness and proactive access to third party information makes the Smart Cooking Assistant very usable and functional as it facilitates enjoyable and practical cooking with entertainment.
 
Currently, the Cooking Assistant supports Siemens kitchen devices, but it can be easily extended to support more devices, even from different manufacturers, like Miele. Another stage of the development of this is to make it multi-user and interweave multiple applications.
 
This Cooking Assistant is just one of a range of assistants that can function around the home, to support the user in all areas of the house. Other areas that are being explored are Home Entertainment, Unified Home Communication and Energy Management, complemented by tools for Easy Service Creation and Delivery. Prototypes of these assistants are integrated within the Ambient Service Integration Suite, a showroom and test bed that provides a comprehensive environment for the testing and exhibition of the project results.
 
To continue the successful work of the SerCHo project and lay the foundations for future smart homes, a new association called ‘connected living’ with industrial and university members was founded at DAI-Labor. The main intention is to combine the different standards and to create a platform where developers can create and publish services for smart environments without a detailed knowledge of the system. Numerous companies from different areas are closely cooperating to exchange knowledge and build services spanning multiple market segments.