An Advanced Tactile-Haptic Controller for Smart Home

A smart home philosophy strongly relies on a technical principle of automatization almost every aspect of today’s way of living. Sole automation of does not only manage system processes in household, or living environment in general, but all adjacent systems and corresponding subsystems which helps to maintain system-in-whole in operational state. From control of environmental temperature, air conditioning, lighting, utility control, etc., all existing “smart” systems predominantly control actuation part of smart home. Very miniscule “smart” systems do manage and serve human-machine interaction part of it and, if are made “smart”, they rely on solutions that utilizes some sort of existing ICT technologies that are mainly optimized for communication and visual presentation, not for in-situ smart home interaction. This paper deals with the problem of development of a tactile-haptic solution for control of smart home specific subsystem and that utilize IoT platform, giving feel and user experience similar to traditional one in form of an advanced switch with regulation ability. Tactile commanding with haptic feedback is presented and applied in smart home temperature regulation. Finally, an IoT platform solution is developed, tactile-haptic relation investigated with optimal solution established, and its functionality is verified as well as is proven in real time environment.