Wot usecases
Web Of Things Use Cases [DRAFT]
Status
This document is a [DRAFT], and part of initial discovery into potential use cases. These will be used as the basis for initial review and the work is ongoing and aims to produce use cases that have had wider expert and public review.
Direct Hearing Aid Support
To date support for individuals living with hearing loss has been localised to individual rooms or devices. This requires a higher level of user interruption than need be the case any longer.
If a user acquires a network aware hearing aid, perhaps that can be driven over wifi (though that's a power challenge), a campus network profile could simply offer and automatically connect to amplification systems as the user moves across campus.
Disambiguation would be limited to choosing between adjacent rooms only.
Not only could this provide amplification as needed, it could provide the far more valuable service of personalized equalization.
The American Printing House for the Blind has equipped recent CSUN conferences with navigational beacons. We should look into if they have has this service tested on a good sized campus, where available paths of human navigation are not rectilinear.
Ideally, this could help blind users navigate walking paths safely. Think in terms of network effect in a defined locale for users on the move.
Description of purpose
Providing a description of a machines purpose via wifi or bluetooth that can be consumed by a users AT on their mobile phone. This could be a vending machine, ticketing booth - its name and description of how to use it could be passed to the users device.
Accessibility profiling thru a network
A preference or profile that can follow a user through a sensor enabled network. This could be for the purposes of navigation (similar to the Beacon use case above) or could relate to information that needs to be served to a user as they progress through a building or task flow.
Container Content detection
A fridge or other container that can detect its contents and inform a blind user of same or what is out of date, needs to be replaced etc.
Directional traffic lights
Traffic lights that can tell the user the *direction* the active way is. Blind users at a junction often hear a sound only and are not informed of if the active way is to their left, right, or straight ahead. A signal, such as haptic feedback could be sent to a persons device to be used with the sound, to help orientate the blind user or user with a cognitive impairment who finds it hard to 'understand' auditory only feedback.
Use of alternate controllers
WoT needs to facilitate alternate controllers for accessibility - where a user may prefer to bypass any built in user interface - and inherent accessibility issues and use their own preferred interface to interact with a WoT powered system.
Acknowledgements
These use cases come from Janina Sajka, Johannes Hund, Saleem Rahman.