A novel smart object-driven UI generation approach for mobile devices in the internet of things

The broad adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) is linked to the possibility to discover and interact easily with objects in the surroundings of users. Because of their characteristics and large diffusion, mobile devices are perfect to connect the IoT and common people. In order to accomplish the challenging task of enabling seamless interaction between users and smart objects, in this paper, we propose a lightweight, standard and REST compliant mechanism for the generation of user interfaces (UIs) on mobile devices driven by smart objects. This approach is expedient for a number of reasons: i) end-users are no longer required to download and use custom mobile vendor-provided apps to interact with smart objects; ii) smart objects can actually drive the interaction by letting mobile devices generate the correct UI for the intended interplay; iii) UIs can be dynamically changed over time without requiring any software update by the user. A suitable lightweight UI description format is presented, together with an implementation for Android devices. An evaluation of the proposed approach has also been conducted in order to prove its feasibility and ease of use.