Managing Self-Explaining Ambient Applications

Introduction: The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a crucial role in realizing the vision of pervasive computing. The variety of devices and services in the IoT often makes manual integration complex and tedious. To mitigate this challenge, self-organization has emerged as a promising approach. Furthermore, the concept of self-explainability has been proposed to clarify user interactions with dynamically interconnected smart objects.
Methods: This paper explores related research in the domains of (a) service composition, (b) self-explainability, and (c) application management within smart environments. To address existing limitations, we propose a novel application management concept. Therefore, we extended a framework that utilizes self-explaining applications to generate user instructions dynamically that explain the control of these. A user study was conducted to assess the effectiveness and preferred options of modalities of these instructions.
Results: The findings indicate that the approach successfully tackles the research question concerning the integration of self-explaining applications into smart environments.