Data-Flow Programming for Smart Homes and Other Smart Spaces

Visual programming languages are a common way for enabling end users to create simple, customized programs in their smart homes. Although visual programming aims at lowering the syntactic and cognitive barriers existing languages lack a simple method for accessing services of smart spaces surrounding the home and therefore restrain the innovative capabilities of users. For example, accessing information about energy consumption or smart parking is often cumbersome and limited to users with advanced technical skills. Based on expert interviews, we extended the existing visual programming language Node-RED with functionalities that enable users to easily access data and services within and beyond their smart homes. Using this prototype, we performed a first evaluation of our solution with some inhabitants of smart homes.