Touch-enabled Programming for the Lab of Things
This work addresses usability issues for developers in fields like elderly care and energy management, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing method to a new environment.
The paper tackled the challenge of programming on the Lab of Things platform by introducing a touch-enabled approach using TouchDevelop, which significantly reduced development time and effort for creating customized applications.
Lab of Things (LoT, lab-of-things.com) is a research platform for interconnection, programming, and large scale deployment of devices and sensors. These devices and sensors can then be used for deployment of field studies in a variety of research areas including elderly care, energy management, and the like. LoT is built on top of HomeOS, a middle-ware component, making interconnection of a wide range of devices possible. LoT also provides cloud storage and remote monitoring capabilities. Traditionally programming on the LoT platform has been done using C# in Microsoft Visual Studio. While LoT programs developed on the .NET framework offer a rich set of functionality, writing programs on LoT can be challenging for developers who are not experienced with the technology involved. In this demonstration, we introduce an innovative programming approach on the LoT platform by building a Generic Application and creating corresponding libraries on the user-friendly TouchDevelop (touchdevelop.com) programming environment. As an example, we implemented the same functionality of the Lab of Things Alerts application using the new Generic App. In addition to a touch-enabled programming environment, the new approach also significantly saves time and effort developers have to devote when creating a customized Lab of Things application.