Submit your papersSubmit Now
For Enquiries: [email protected]
IIARD LogoIIARD

A Comparative Study of Touch, Voice, and Gesture Interactions for a Universal Smart-Home Control Interface

Wosa, Obunda, Dufegha, Tarila P, Ademe, Conquer

Abstract

There is currently a rapid rise in the usage of smart home devices, which has led to a disjointed system where users need to navigate various applications and control methods. This paper provides a comparative evaluation of three main interaction methods: touch, voice, and gesture, for developing a universal smart home control interface. Through an empirical study involving 45 participants from various age groups and technical skill levels, we evaluated the effectiveness, efficiency, user satisfaction, accessibility, and error rates of each method. Our results indicate that while voice interaction is more efficient for simple commands, touch interfaces excel in tasks requiring precision, and gesture control presents distinct advantages for hands-free situations. We suggest a multimodal integration framework that utilizes the strengths of each interaction method to develop an adaptive and context-aware universal control system. This research offers important insights for designing inclusive smart home interfaces that accommodate different user needs and environmental conditions.

Keywords

Smart HomeMultimodal InteractionVoice ControlGesture RecognitionTouch InterfaceHuman-Computer InteractionUniversal Design.

References

Apthorpe, N., Reisman, D., Sundaresan, S., & Feamster, N. (2017). Privacy considerations in voice-activated smart home systems: A comparative analysis. In Proceedings of the 2017 Workshop on Internet of Things Security and Privacy (pp. 33–38). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3139937.3139943. Celesti, A., Fazio, M., Villari, M., & Puliafito, A. (2019). A comparative study of interaction modalities in IoT-based smart home systems. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 6(2), 2299–2311. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2018.2871402 Diefenbach, S., Hassenzahl, M., Eckoldt, K., & Laschke, M. (2017). Touch-based interfaces for home automation: Usability and user satisfaction. Behaviour & Information Technology, 36(8), 803–817. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2017.1288272 Findlater, L., & McGrenere, J. (2010). A comparison of static, adaptive, and adaptable menus. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 89–98. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753340 Kientz, J., Arriaga, R., Patel, S., & Abowd, G. (2018). Natural user interfaces in home automation: A comprehensive usability study. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 25(6), Article 32. https://doi.org/10.1145/3243347 Molchanov, P., Yang, X., Gupta, S., Kim, K., De Mello, S., & Kautz, J. (2018). Hand gesture recognition for smart home control: A deep learning approach. In 2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 8559– 8567). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR.2018.00893 Norman, D. A. (2013). The design of everyday things (Revised and expanded ed.). Basic Books. Oviatt, S. (1999). Ten myths of multimodal interaction. Communications of the ACM, 42(11), 74–81. https://doi.org/10.1145/319382.319398 Pearl, C., Cohen, M., & Giangola, J. (2020). Voice user interfaces in smart homes: User experience and performance evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–14). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376448 Preece, J., Rogers, Y., & Sharp, H. (2019). Multimodal interaction design for smart home environments: A comparative analysis. International Journal of Human- Computer Interaction, 35(12), 1089–1112. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2018.1543084 Schmidt, A., Beigl, M., & Gellersen, H.-W. (2019). Context-aware adaptive interfaces for smart home control: Switching between interaction modalities. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 23(5–6), 697–712. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-019-01223-3 Turk, M. (2014). Multimodal interaction: A review. Pattern Recognition Letters, 36, 189–195. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2013.07.003 Vanderheiden, G., Zimmermann, G., & Stephanidis, C. (2019). Universal design of multimodal interfaces for smart home control. Universal Access in the Information Society, 18(3), 527–541. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-018- 0593-4 Voit, A., Weber, D., & Henze, N. (2019). Aging in place: Multimodal smart home interaction for elderly users. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 3(4), Article 140. https://doi.org/10.1145/3369805 IJCSMT Wachs, J. P., Kölsch, M., Stern, H., & Edan, Y. (2011). Vision-based hand-gesture applications. Communications of the ACM, 54(2), 60–71. https://doi.org/10.1145/1897816.1897838.

More Articles from INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICAL THEORY