Controlling appliances with pen and paper

Networked appliances are consumer or household devices with a network interface which allows them to he connected to a (home) network. Networked appliances offer major benefits compared to their conventional equivalent. Software services can operate upon an array of these appliances to offer value added functionality. In this case the user interface to control the appliances will be inadequate. Commonly networked appliances may either he controlled using the traditional user interface, such as switches and buttons on the device, or alternatively using a PC based interface. Traditional user interfaces often cannot support the full functionality offered by the appliance. The PC based interfaces tend to be too complicated for the average user and enables the PC based interface to be suitable and available in many situations. Therefore a user interface which supports the new functionalities and is easy to use is required. In this paper, Anoto functionality enabled pen and paper are suggested as a suitable interface. Pen and paper are well known to all users and suitable paper forms make it straightforward to fully control and program networked appliances without a PC interface. Thus an important barrier to the acceptance of networked appliances is broken. Furthermore, the presented approach can be used to integrate the control of multiple appliances and services. A major challenge to this work has been the integration of different network protocols used in the home. The use of an OSGi gateway has proven a great help to integrate them. This paper discusses an approach to the integration of pen and paper with networked appliances using an OSGi gateway. Because of the use of an OSGi gateway, the approach is not restricted to controlling devices which use a specific single network protocol. Rather, the approach can be used with appliances which communicate using a wide variety of protocols.