Dynamic connection management between Web apps and peripheral devices by Web driver

Many people carry smartphones and tablets with them on a daily basis and are constantly connected via wireless. As the Internet of Things (IoT) comes of age, people increasingly want to use various devices in the surrounding environment in conjunction with their smartphones. The cost of developing services that cooperate with the devices is high because various kinds of devices exist and multiple OSs for smartphones need to be supported. To mitigate the issue, we propose a dynamic device connection method that can connect services (e.g. Web applications) with devices located close to users by installing the device drivers and/or protocol adapters dynamically. Developers can create new Web applications easily because the device drivers absorb the differences of the devices and provide a common Web interface for them. The protocol adapters provide access capability to OS application programming interfaces (APIs) for Web technology. We implemented the proposed method on an Android smartphone and evaluated it with Bluetooth Low Energy devices and a Classic Bluetooth device. Results showed that the method absorbs the difference of function and protocol and delivers a reasonable performance.