SAPIENS: Towards Software Architecture to Support Peripheral Interaction in Smart Environments

• Published in: Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction 2019-06, Vol.3 (EICS), p.1-24, Article 11
• Main Authors: Schipor, Ovidiu-Andrei, Vatavu, Radu-Daniel, Wu, Wenjun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Human computer interaction (HCI); Human-centered computing; Interactive systems and tools; Software and its engineering
• ISSN: 2573-0142; 2573-0142
• DOI: 10.1145/3331153

We present SAPIENS, a software architecture designed to support engineering of interactive systems featuring peripheral interaction in the context of smart environments. SAPIENS introduces dedicated components for user and device tracking, attention detection, priority management for devices, tasks, and notifications, context-awareness inference, user interruptibility prediction, and device interchangeability that can be instantiated at will according to the needs of the application. To implement these components effectively, SAPIENS employs event-based processing by reusing the core engine of a recently introduced software architecture, Euphoria (Schipor et al., 2019), that was specifically designed for engineering interactions in smart environments with heterogeneous I/O devices, and relies entirely on web standards, protocols, and open data-interchange formats, such as JavaScript, WebSockets, HTTP, and JSON. This inheritance makes SAPIENS flexible and adaptable to support implementation of diverse application scenarios for peripheral interaction and for a wide variety of smart environments, devices, platforms, data formats, and contexts of use. We present our design criteria for SAPIENS regarding (1) event handling techniques, (2) quality, (3) contextual, and (4) attention-related properties, and describe its components and dataflows that make SAPIENS a specialized software architecture for peripheral interaction scenarios. We also demonstrate SAPIENS with a practical application, inspired and adapted from Bakker's (2013) classical example for peripheral interaction, for which we provide an online simulation tool that researchers and practitioners can readily use to consult actual JavaScript code implementing the inner logic of selected components of our architecture as well as to observe live JSON messages exchanged by the various components of SAPIENS.