Smart homes, as a part of home automation, are expected to be intelligent and human-aware. The recent Google acquisition of Nest Labs (https://nest.com/), which designs and manufactures sensor-driven, WiFi-enabled, self-learning, programmable thermostats and smoke detectors, is evidence for the potential huge market of smart home technologies in the next decade. At the same time, human-centered computing (HCC) research aims to understand the increasingly coupled relationships between people and computing. HCC research has been accelerating in recent years due to the emergence of mobile devices such as smartphones/mobile tablets, wearable sensors and computers, as well as distributed environmental sensors. Understanding human beings and their contexts can help develop truly smart homes in many ways. For example, using small wearable sensors integrated into clothing or attached to human subjects and intelligent signal processing algorithms, it is possible to obtain the wearer’s status such as activity, gesture, location, emotion and physiological conditions. Such human-awareness can facilitate natural human robot interaction, behavioral monitoring, health monitoring, energy management, wearable robots for rehabilitation, etc., which can be part of a smart home system.The main objective of this special issue is to collect key research papers on the state-of-the-art of human-centered computing and its potential applications in smart homes.
