Supporting Tasks in a Programmable Smart Home

One of the most promising domains of pervasive computing is in the area of homes and healthcare. There has been a lot of interest in seeing how smart homes can foster independent living and an enhanced life style for elderly and disabled people, and how active, information-rich hospitals can support both patients and the medical staff in their daily activities. However, one of the key challenges for smart environments is programmability - a smart home needs to support different kinds of tasks depending on the requirements of the inhabitants, and hence, needs to be configured and programmed appropriately. It is not scalable to build one-off, customized architectures and applications for different smart homes. Hence, we need a highly configurable architecture that allows the rapid development and customization of smart homes for different kinds of tasks. In this paper, we discuss the challenge and complexities of programming smart homes. We also propose a solution that allows developing high-level parameterized tasks that support users in their daily lives. The solution includes an autonomic task execution framework that automatically configures and repairs the execution of tasks depending on the current state of the environment, context-sensitive policies, and learned user preferences.