Abstract. The purpose of this Wizard-of-Oz study was to explore the intuitive verbal and non-verbal goal-directed behavior of naïve participants in an intelligent robotics apartment. Participants had to complete seven mundane tasks, for instance, they were asked to turn on the light. Participants were explicitly instructed to consider nonstandard ways of completing the respective tasks. A multi-method approach revealed that most participants favored speech and interfaces like switches and screens to communicate with the intelligent robotics apartment. However, they required instructions to use the interfaces in order to perceive them as competent targets for human-machine interaction. Hence, first important steps were taken to investigate how to design an intelligent robotics apartment in a user-centered and user-friendly manner.Keywords: Social robot • smart home • human-robot interaction • use-case scenario • usability • intuitive design • user-centered design.

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Touch can convey emotions on a very direct level. We propose feelabuzz, a system implementing a remote touch connection using standard mobile phone hardware. Accelerometer data is mapped to vibration strength on two smartphones connected via the Internet. This is done using direct mapping techniques, without any abstraction of the acceleration signal. By this, feelabuzz can be used for implicit context communication, i. e. the background monitoring of the natural movements of the users themselves or their environments, as well as for direct communication, i. e. voluntary and symbolic signalling through this new channel. We describe the system and its implementation, discuss its possible implications and verify the system's ability to recognizably transmit different actions in a preliminary user study.

Smart homes have been mostly treated as homogeneous environments where each room is distinguished by the activities performed there but not by any fundamentally different basic parameters for systems to operate in. We argue that at least for bathroom environments, things like the extensive presence of liquid water and humidity and special privacy considerations challenge these assumptions. We discuss typical and unique challenges for ubiquitous computing interfaces in bathroom environments and we look at how actual and conceptual systems confront these challenges. We review bathroom systems in the literature and present two systems of our own to exemplify the unique challenges to smart environments the bathroom provides, one of which is presented here for the first time.