Towards an architecture for human computer interaction within the internet of things and ambient assisted living domain

The Internet of Things (IoT) is part of the fourth industrial revolution; nowadays, it is common to find regular objects connected to Internet. Here, the connectivity should be transparent to users; however, the interactions that are involved between people and things should be natural and appropriate to each profile and need. In this context, this paper proposes an architecture named AALIIoT (Ambient Assisted Living Interactions for IoT), which supports the design of IoT solutions for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environments in order to facilitate the interaction between users with special needs and the IoT artifacts (i.e., sensors, actuators). Also, this architecture contemplates different modes of interaction (e.g., gestural, auditory, visual, cerebral) to allow the communication between devices and people for everyday activities, which may be difficult for them. Finally, a system prototype based on AALIIoT has been implemented, which takes into account specific needs of a user profile. Then, for the evaluation of the proposed architecture, a quasi-experiment was executed, which allowed to analyze the architecture and the perceived efficacy from the point of view of 5 systems engineers and undergraduate students. The results show that the participants perceived AALIIoT to be easy to use, useful, and also expressed their intention to use the architecture in the future.