DEUS: Debugging for End Users in Smart Environments

Funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG), 2025–2028

The task of debugging smart home setups is spinning out of control. To make matters worse, smart home users are not trained programmers, and they live inside the environment they are debugging, making testing nearly impossible, and the effects of mistakes (like bedroom lights turning on at 3am) very real. The problem expands beyond the smart home to public environments like hotel rooms with unintelligible automations, and the workplace, where building automations regularly ignore users’ individual needs and provide little agency.

The DEUS project tackles this challenge by (1) unveiling users’ mental models of smart home automations, (2) documenting their debugging strategies, and (3) proposing new interaction techniques and concepts for digital tools to better support these tasks. We then (4) design and implement research prototypes to (5) scientifically validate our findings, tools, and techniques in user studies.

This project is carried out in collaboration with Prof. Susanne Boll's lab at the University of Oldenburg.