Enabling user-centered interactions in the Internet of Things

We introduce a novel interaction method which integrates humans into Internet of Things and advances from the existing client-server paradigm. We take advantage of the shared physical space to facilitate decentralized and seamless human-to-thing, human-to-human and thing-to-thing interactions. We build these interactions upon two core technologies: mobile agents and NFC. Mobile agents realize autonomous execution of user-specific interaction tasks among things while facilitating cooperation and interoperability. Humans initiate and control interactions through physical actions that trigger communications, e.g. mobile agent migration, between NFC devices even over disparate systems. Human social relationships are utilized to disseminate tasks further in the IoT system. We discuss the benefits of this method in comparison with the common smartphone-based control of smart spaces. Real-world evaluation shows that this interaction method is feasible for resource-constrained embedded IoT devices.