Background

In modern life, an individual wishing to control the status of devices in an environment, for instance in the home, can easily achieve this through the use of 'Smart Home' devices, which s/he could then interact with by means of buttons on a remote control unit. In a more sophisticated system, these buttons can be replaced with a user's speech or other input mechanisms; situations that may benefit from this approach include those where the use of limbs is either impaired or undesirable.

However, as the number of controlled devices increases such interfaces can become tedious and cumbersome to use, involving the user in navigating through numerous levels of menus and sub menus before appropriate controls for a specific device are arrived at. Attempts to address this problem frequently do so by means such as increasing the density of information and control functions in their interfaces and/or increasing the types of control input actions that are necessary.

For some this is problematic, as many of the users who would benefit most from a highly automated environment also find complex interfaces and/or precise control movements challenging or impossible. As such, there is a need for a method of interacting with a highly automated environment that employs an interface which is both reasonably quick to use and which requires only a limited range and small number of simple user inputs to actuate effectively. The ART project aims to achieve this.