IoT End User Programming Models

Abstract

The advent of smart devices and sensors (the Internet of Things or IoT) will create increasing demands for the automation of devices based on sensor, time, and other inputs. This is essentially a programming task with all the problems and difficulties that programming entails, for example, modularity, feature interaction, debugging, and understanding. Moreover, much of the programming for smart devices is going to be done not by professional programmers but by end users, often end users without any programming experience or computational literacy. Our research is aimed at exploring the programming space and the associated issues using a case study of a smart sign that can be controlled using a variety of sensors. We have developed a general system for programming smart devices and, in this paper, explore a variety of different user interfaces for programming this system for our smart sign.