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The unpleasant experience of long queue while waiting to check-in at hotel is a common problem faced by guests especially during holidays. As such, various self-service technologies (SSTs) were introduced over the years by researchers with the aim to increase the avenues of checking-in guests. Self-check-in kiosk is an invention that allows guests to check-in themselves using bar codes that were sent to them in advance. Although bar codes are able to reduce guests' waiting time, it cannot be used to unlock hotel rooms. This makes mobile device a better medium for hotel check-in and access control system. Despite mobile device is very convenient and easy to operate, guests would have to own the specific type of mobile device such as near-field communication smartphone and its customized application before using the system. This makes the solution not user-friendly to guests. Therefore, a novel encrypted quick response scheme is presented to extend the existing SST to unify the process of check-in and room access control. The proposed scheme uses quick response codes and cryptography techniques to generate secure hotel keys that can be printed or stored inside a smartphone, thus, supporting a wide range of guests.

Emerging somatosensory technology offers unprecedented opportunities for researchers and industrial practitioners to design a touchless smart home system. However, existing touchless smart home systems often fail to attract a satisfying level of acceptance among home owners. The experience users have with the touchless system is key to making somatosensory technology a pervasive computing home application, yet little research has been conducted to assess the influence of direct and indirect experience on user's behavioral intention to use somatosensory technology. To address this research gap, this paper set up an experimental design to investigate the influence of direct and indirect experience in user technology acceptance. Using an in-house developed touchless system, two experimental studies (i.e., video observation versus product trial) were conducted with sixty-two participants to investigate whether the user experience has an impact on the adoption decision. Our findings indicate that direct experience has an impact on a user's acceptance of somatosensory technology. We Viewing versus Experiencing in Adopting Somatosensory Technology for Smart Applications/ Teh et al.

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<span>An Internet of Things (IoT) FPGA-based home hub to automate control operations in a home environment was designed and built. The proposed system uses an FPGA home hub as its local analytic engine with an IoT platform to store the sensory data. The FPGA was programmed in Verilog HDL using Quartus II provided by Altera. The WiFi capability of the FPGA was extended through an ESP8266 chip to ease the interfacing with various sensors connected to it. The system can be configured and monitored through a web application coded in JavaScript. Various test cases were carried out on the implemented system at Multimedia University (MMU) Digital Home Lab. The results verified the functionality of the system in triggering real home appliances (i.e. air conditioning unit and lighting) based on multiple sensor nodes without conflicting each other. The ability to allow user to configure the control rules based on the sensory data via web interface hosted using ThingSpeak Plugins is also presented and demonstrated in this project. The base design is utilizing Altera Cyclone IV EP4CE22F17C6N FPGA with 153 I/O pins, which is highly scalable and adaptable to the requirements of home environments. This shows promising application of FPGA in supporting scalable IoT home automation system.</span>