Assistive technologies have allowed people with disabilities to perform daily tasks with greater independence and autonomy, especially for visually impaired people. Using smart home solutions allows these users to control their homes with less cognitive and physical demand. However, making such applications accessible to meet the needs of visually impaired users, especially in developing countries, remains a challenge. This paper investigates the perceptions of these users about home automation technologies through semi-structured interviews. A total of 20 visually impaired people participated in the interviews. A thematic analysis revealed results concerning the following themes: (1) how people go about their lives at home and around, how people interact with current appliances, objects and environments, (3) how people perceive their attitude to technologies, (4) the Brazilian context of smart homes, (5) what people think smart homes should do and (6) envisaging ways of interacting with smart home systems. The results obtained provide significant insight into the needs of visually-impaired people in Brazil, with analysis of issues that are common with previous studies in more developed countries and specific issues that have important particularities and implications in Brazil and other developing countries.

The use of Smart Homes has grown considerably in the past decade. Enabling end-users to develop rules to program their homes and devices is very important to empower them. Several studies have analysed trigger-action programming tools, primarily using form-based and data-flow approaches for programming interfaces. This study evaluated the usability of a block-based tool for end-user development of rules to control smart homes and compared the difficulties encountered by non-programmers and programmers. Evaluations involved 10 programmers and 10 non-programmers in Brazil. A thematic analysis of 247 problem instances (80 from programmers and 167 from non-programmers) yielded the following themes, with problems related to condition blocks, action blocks, states and actions, time-related tasks, block configuration and personalisation, information architecture, programming logic, conceptual model of smart homes, simulator and debugging, help and technical problems. Despite most non-programmers being able to experiment with blocks, their task completion rates were significantly lower than programmers. The analysis showed aspects where block-based programming can enhance the use for non-programmers. They also confirmed interaction aspects revealed by previous studies using form-based and data-flow approaches that also occur with block-based programming to design smart home rules, with important contributions to improve end-user development tools for smart homes.

This article presents a systematic evaluation of a framework based on Genetic Programming (GP) which aims the automatic generation of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications. Developing WSN applications poses a challenge due to massive distribution of the network nodes. The automatic generation of applications reduces drastically costs, since the manual development is a laborious process. In our approach, the user describes the desired global behavior as a fitness function which guides the evolution of the application by the GP. A scripting language based on events and actions is used to represent the WSN behavior and the GP generates programs in this language. In order to evaluate the framework, a problem of multiple events detection is introduced. Several problem instances were used to appraise the performance of our method under different parameters. Results evidence the feasibility of our approach for the proposed problem, highlighting the challenges posed by the large search space and the dead end routing problem.

The development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications is an arduous task, since the application needs to be customized for each sensor. Thus, the automatic generation of WSN's applications is desirable to reduce costs, since it drastically reduces the human effort. This paper presents the use of Genetic Programming to automatically generate WSNs applications. A scripting language based on events and actions is proposed to represent the WSN behavior. Events represent the state of a given sensor node and actions modify these states. Some events are internal states and others are external states captured by the sensors. The genetic programming is used to automatically generate WSNs applications described using this scripting language. These scripts are executed by all network's sensors. This approach enables the application designer to define only the overall objective of the WSN. This objective is defined by means of a fitness function. An event-detection problem is presented in order to evaluate the proposed method. The results shown the capability of the developed approach to successfully solve WSNs problems through the automatic generation of applications.

The development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications is an arduous task, since the developer has to design the behavior of the nodes and their interactions. The automatic generation of WSN's applications is desirable to reduce costs, since it drastically reduces the human effort. This paper presents the use of Genetic Programming to automatically generate WSNs applications. A scripting language based on events and actions is proposed to represent the WSN behavior. Events represent the state of a given sensor node and actions modify these states. Some events are internal states and others are external states captured by the sensors. A parallel genetic algorithm is used to automatically generate WSNs applications in this scripting language. These scripts are executed by a middleware installed on all sensors nodes. This approach enables the application designer to define only the overall objective of the WSN. This objective is defined by means of a fitness function. An event-detection problem is presented in order to evaluate the proposed method. The results showed the capability of the developed approach to successfully solve WSNs problems through the automatic generation of applications.