Abstract
The recent progress of IoT technologies, including broad penetration of smart appliances such as remotely controllable lights, thermostats and cameras, have changed the way we interact with the appliances in our homes and perform our daily activities. However, the significant heterogeneity in the emerging IoT devices has led to fragmented smart-home systems in which each single appliance vendor provides proprietary solution for appliance specific connectivity and user experience. One of the desired solutions in smart-home systems is to have a unified smartphone app that can control any arbitrary IoT appliances. In this extended abstract we focus on the design of such an app only from the user interaction viewpoint. In particular, we present SPOT app, a smartphone-based platform for multi-vendor smart-home appliances, that features an adaptive and device-agnostic user interface enabled by a novel device driver mechanism. To validate the flexibility and feasibility of our design, we have built a SPOT prototype based on 8 real IoT devices and present the quality of generating such adaptive graphical user interface by the measure of screen smoothness in the prototyped android app.