The central component of this research is an editor for the definition and customization of multimodal interactions and controls in smart buildings.

Building occupants have a considerable interest in the current state of their environment. Studies have shown that making building data transparent helps occupants to understand their energy consumption. In addition, transparent data can help to increase the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) and therefore increase the occupants’ health. However, such data is often not accessible, intransparent and mostly not easy to understand for a typical user. Modern buildings equipped with various sensors tend to collect massive amounts of data, but often fail to provide information in an accessible, user-friendly and meaningful way. To give an example, a level of particulates at 170.000 ppcm might not be a helpful answer to understand the air quality. I pose the research hypothesis that an effective visualization of IEQ-related data in a smart building helps its occupants to develop an awareness about their IEQ. Furthermore, many smart environments offer diverse proprietary and therefore incompatible controlling systems. In order to interact with these or to gather information, its occupants have to switch between multiple interfaces. As a solution, I combine comprehensive and meaningful IEQ information with the possibility to control and improve the environment using a mobile application. The system’s usability is evaluated in iterative cycles with application domain experts and by means of two user studies. The first study serves the purpose of illustrating the user’s comprehension of the design concept whereas the second study evaluates the resulting system’s performance in terms of usability. The studies show that the mobile application enables users to get a better understanding for IEQ-relevant data.

In our research we propose a portfolio of serious games for home-based stroke rehabilitation. The game approach enriches a patient’s training experience and thus establishes a higher level of compliance to prescribed exercises, while maintaining a supportive training environment as found in common therapy sessions. Our system monitors the patient’s performance while exercising and provides clinicians with an interface to personalize the training for their patients. In order to achieve an increased compliance to home-based exercising, we provide a collection of mini games based on rehabilitation exercises used in conventional physical therapy. All games are part of a joint storyline that encourages a patient to accomplish tasks on a treasure island. Playable games change over time to adapt to the patient’s state of rehabilitation and drive diversification. This research was inspired by a previous project at Carnegie Mellon University that provides a non-gamified way of self-governed exercising. While this prototype was a major breakthrough in the domain of computer-aided rehabilitation, patients experienced difficulties using the complex interface resulting in a lack of compliance and motivation to use the system. However, to offer a non-gamified alternative of exercising to our solution, the previous system was integrated as an independent component, giving patients the choice between the two systems.

According to current studies intuitive ways of controlling are for instance gestures, the use of voice-recognition or mobile phone applications. In this thesis the focus is set to the use of voice-recognition and the combination with existing controls. A possible way of integrating voice-recognition in the current system is using Apple’s HomeKit. This framework provides the possibility of using Siri, Apple’s voice assistance, to control accessories. Furthermore, users can exchange the application with any other HomeKit supporting application in the App store according to their personal preferences.

The aim of the thesis is the develop a framework for context-aware recipe recommendation systems. In order to address user-specific recommendations, the system is using three different information sources. First, it analyzes ratings from the community that is using the application (that is developed as a part of the thesis). Second, it extracts the current context of the user by using measurements of the user’s smartphone sensors. The context information includes location, season and activity. Finally, the system uses the data of an activity tracker information to draw inferences about the current mood of the user, which is also part of the current context.

 

In this thesis, a flexible and extensible framework for maintaining supermarket content and recommending products to supermarket customers, has been proposed. The system is composed of three distinct subsystems namely: Client Applications, Supermarket Content Management System (SCMS) and a Product Recommendation Engine (PRE).

Deployment and publication of software can be painful and time consuming. In this thesis we address the release management of software related to continuous integration and delivery. As collaboration is a central point in agile software development, we aim to promote collaboration in the area of release management by improving the release process. We focus on the release process, as the Rugby process model describes it. This thesis deals with the usage of releases in the context of Rugby and examines their impact. We conduct an evaluation to address the use of releases in meetings. This leads to an idea that can improve the application of releases as communication models.

Regular user feedback is important, as it helps to validate requirements and improves user satisfaction. However, it fails to unfold its full potential in many projects. Common challenges include low user motivation, fragmented feedback channels, and missing information, making it difficult for the development team to extract the underlying requirements of the user. We aim to address these problems by proposing a system for Context-Aware Feedback (CAFE), which integrates user feedback into the software evolution process. The objective is to provide a channel for users to give feedback with as little effort as possible in order to bridge the gap between users and developers. CAFE stores feedback directly in the issue tracker enriching it with recorded usage context and visualizes the evolution of requirements through user feedback. In a formative evaluation with controlled user experiments we found that both developers and users prefer CAFE to other feedback channels and that automatically gathered context data is useful. Both the fact that user feedback is saved in the issue tracker and the added value of Feedback Traceability are regarded as beneficial.

Continuous delivery allows software developers to deliver applications to the customer with a few clicks and therefore helps them to gather feedback fast. We present a continuous delivery process model and describe how we integrated this process model into the iOS Praktikum. We explain how we thought the concepts to the student using different teaching resources like a cross-project release-team. We evaluate the course using an online questionnaire after the end of the projects. Our observations show that participating students understood and applied the concepts of continuous delivery and are convinced about the benefits. Continuous delivery increased the amount of releases increased the speed of the delivery process compared to earlier versions of the Praktikum.

Mobile applications are of increasing relevance to businesses in all industries. While companies are progressively adopting agile methodologies to facilitate faster development, there is a lack of suitable workflows that accommodate all requirements and restrictions of a corporate environment. There are, however, promising approaches to continuous delivery for mobile projects in the academic field. Our goal is to transfer a well-proven process model and system from Technische Universität München (TUM) to the mobile business line at Capgemini, a multinational provider of IT consulting, outsourcing, and professional services. We describe a modified and extended process model that includes optional as well as variable subprocesses to provide a flexible solution. By allowing each project to adapt the workflow to their specific needs, we simultaneously provide a way of standardizing how continuous delivery is applied to mobile projects in the company. After evaluating our solution in eight deliberately chosen projects, results show increased frequency and thoroughness of integration, resulting in more immediate feedback about changes. Delivery is simplified and accelerated, saving both time and resources.

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