Human-machine interfaces for socially connected devices: From smart households to smart cities

This chapter defines a smart community as a set of smart homes, commercial buildings, public spaces, and transportation with boundaries based on walking distance, located in a physical region. This smart community uses social products and provides community public services, smart water management, smart mobility management to promote social interaction. The communication uses a tailored Human Machine Interface (HMI) within a gamification structure that provides feedback and adjustments based on user profiles and behavior to teach, motivate, and engage end-users in achieving specific goals, such as energy reduction. Hence, gamification builds strategies to make engaging applications by triggering internal and external motivations in end-users. A smart home gathers and analyzes data from its sensors, then delivers analytics and predictions to end-users and service provides as well as strives to improve the management of its various subsystems through social products. In that regard, the multi-sensor system allows experts to know more about the needs of homes to propose actions that reduce energy consumption and improve the home and community quality of life by galvanizing individuals to read, analyze, and act upon their energy consumption through sensor profile patterns. Thus, this chapter discusses the use of an adaptive neural network fuzzy inference and a fuzzy logic decision system to evaluate the level of energy consumption in households and the type of environmental home. These decision systems give insights to propose an interactive and tailored HMI for each kind of home and community interaction. Finally, this chapter discusses improving the quality of life of people who are elderly using connected devices that transmit and receive information inside households or public spaces via an HMI.