DomAIn: Towards Programless Smart Homes

We are far from the full adoption of smart home technologies, let alone realizing truly intelligent homes. There are many barriers preventing homeowners from fully adopting smart home technologies, chief among them being their low perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEoU). Current smart home ecosystems and frameworks only support simple triggers and require homeowners to specify step-by-step logic or purchase new devices to automate new tasks, which severely limits the PU and PEoU of these technologies. We propose DomAIn, a smart home platform that automatically generates, programs, and deploys logic to satisfy a wide range of home-based tasks based on available devices in the home environment, without requiring users to manually "program" any logic. We demonstrate through real deployments and user studies that by incorporating DomAIn, a platform that reduces the need for users to program logic, we can significantly improve a variety of factors that affect PU and PEoU, such as customizability and complexity, by up to 38%, as well as satisfy a diverse range of tasks in home scenarios.