Development of a User Centered Based user interface for building automation control

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu | Master's thesis

Date

2019-03-11

Department

Major/Subject

Translational Engineering

Mcode

ELEC 3023

Degree programme

AEE - Master’s Programme in Automation and Electrical Engineering (TS2013)

Language

en

Pages

66+7

Series

Abstract

In recent years, the field of smart buildings has generated much interest for indoor environment where people spent most of their time. Intense research has been focused on improving the building automation system (BAS) to incorporate smart tools and services in order to improve system efficiency and provide well responsive, safe and proactive indoor environment. However, little effort has been made in improving user building interaction that not only restricted the user’s ability to easily operate the system in fact it has also lowered down the user’s confidence for the system. The first objective of the thesis was to select a better option of user building interaction type by doing review of previous research work and comparative analysis of existing systems in the market based on evaluation parameters. From the comparative analysis, it was concluded that only voice user interface (VUI) exhibits complete system acceptability in addition to the flexibility, portability, remote accessibility, usability in comparison to other user building interaction types. Moreover, Amazon Alexa is used for development of VUI that is more system adaptable than other VUIs. The second objective of the thesis was to develop and implement a UI prototype based on selected user building interaction mode to determine its feasibility of integration with existing BAS. A system architecture is proposed and four skills were designed that not only determine the feasibility of control of devices using voice but also capable of performing non-productive tasks on behalf of users to save time for them. The Amazon Alexa and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are primarily used as the development platform for interaction model and backend services for a User Interface (UI). Whereas third party APIs are also used to execute tasks outside of AWS cloud. The developed skills were tested and deployed in the system where multiple users can access the skills from multiple room profiles.

Description

Supervisor

Ketomäki, Jaakko

Thesis advisor

Maaspuro, Mika

Keywords

smart building, building automation system, voice user interface, Amazon Alexa, Amazon Web Services

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Citation