Usability of State Based Boolean eBlocks
Susan Cotterell · 2005
The advent of sensor networks has enabled a vast number of sensor-based applications such as monitoring forest fires, ensuring structural integrity of buildings or bridges, monitoring homes or offices, and others. However, sensor network application developers are often scientists, office workers, doctors, or homeowners, and not computer programmers, often not even engineers. Thus, setting up a sensor network can be cumbersome or costly. In this paper, we discuss experiments utilizing a set of electronic blocks, called eBlocks, that developers can use to build small-scale monitor-control systems. eBlocks are intended for non-experts and do not require any programming or electronics experience. To enable the design of useful systems, eBlocks must support some logic function and some state functions. We previously developed an intuitive logic block and demonstrated its successful use by non-experts. In this paper, we introduce our basic set of state function blocks – prolong, toggle, trip, and pulse – and we demonstrate their successful use by nearly two-hundred non-expert users. Given a description of a desired system’s behavior, more than 50%, and in some cases 75 % or 85%, of non-experts could correctly choose, connect and configure each of those state blocks in a short 10-minute or less time period.