Assessment of a mixed reality smart home controller: HoloHome pilot study on healthy adults

Abstract

This work presents HoloHome, a Mixed Reality application that aims to provide a new means of interaction to control the Smart Home components while providing continuous support for the inhabitants, including older adults and people with limited mobility and cognitive skills. HoloHome integrates several technological paradigms such as Mixed Reality, Internet of Things, and Ambient Assisted Living to maximize the tailored domestic comfort for the Smart Home’s inhabitants while promoting their comfort, safety, and independence in performing daily activities. It is designed and implemented on Microsoft HoloLens, ensuring the connection of the Mixed Reality environment with the distributed network of domestic sensors through the WiFi-enabled microcontrollers to present an innovative method of interaction with the Smart Home and IoT network. Additionally, HoloHome provides unique services and assistive technologies mainly designed for older adults and people with short-term memory deficits to provide continuous assistance, support, and instruction for household activities. This paper conducts the assessment of HoloHome, where the proposed system's usability, cybersickness, and effectiveness are investigated. The usability of HoloHome is validated on a sample of healthy adults to highlight desirable modifications before further assessments of older adults and people with disabilities. This pilot study demonstrated a good level of perceived usability (71.5%) among healthy adults, leading toward the best possible adjustments prior to proposing the system to the more fragile users.