Smart home notifications are about letting you know something interesting or important has occurred. The challenge for the smart home is in knowing what is merely interesting to you and what is important. Our research to date has shown that we need different priorities for notifications to facilitate this but, we have kept these to a minimum to avoid confusion and keep things simple:
Priority 1 notifications are for information of high importance. This includes things like the alarm system being enabled or disabled.
It also includes notification of Home Control System errors.
These notifications are for information of medium importance. This includes changes in house mode, people arriving home, etc.
It also includes notification of Home Control System warnings.
Priority 3 notifications are information of low importance, such as general updates, e.g. it's started raining, weather forecasts, etc.
Notifications are a 'common capability' available to every element of our smart home. So any dumb sensor or any other object in our smart home could trigger one. It is the Home Control System which has the whole home context though and thus makes an intelligent decision on whether to send one and how it is sent. The Home Control System can also decide to change the priority.
In addition we have alerts, which are basically very high importance notifications (priority 0 if you like). Typically these may use several technologies to ensure delivery.
And above all else the smart home has an alarm. This is used for to provide a local audible and/or visual warning, typically requiring urgent action. This is in real-time and via a sounder, strobe or warning light. Alarm activation also results in alerts being sent.
We also use a priority 4 and this is purely for testing. Priority 4 notifiactions get sent out across all delivery technologies and by all instances of our Home Control System (live, development, demos, showcase, etc.).
Too many notifications can become annoying very quickly. Mostly you only want to hear about the important stuff (priority 1 and 2 by our definition). To faciliate this, our models notifications as a service that can be switched on and off via the various user interfaces (depending on role). When switched off, only priority 1 and 2 notifications are delivered.
Users of our contextual smart home can request notifications for any object modelled and any value using its AI capability. So for example, a user could ask "Let me know when the front door is opened." and the user will be notified wheh the front door is opened.
Notifications can also be cleared individually or all of them using the AI interface.
Notice that we haven't talked about delivery technologies yet. The contextual smart home decides what the most appropriate method to use is based on whole home context, user location, etc. This could be in the form of a local or whole home voice announcement or delivered via our AI as part of a persistent of a conversation thread.
It could also be a local notification using some visual indicator, such as our dynamic smart lighting.
One technology we are using is push notiifcations, using the QPush and Pushover services.
As part of the personalised user experience, our contextual smart home sends notifications when the coffee is ready.
As part of the personalised user experience, our contextual smart home sends notifications when the washing machine has completed its washing cycle.
