Ubiquitous Reach and Remote Control of Devices: Introducing Kpml - a Protocol for Efficientinteraction with Devices

People find themselves commuting longer and longertimes to work or traveling away from home. Manyfamilies have both parents working. Time dedicatedfor household chores and monitoring has becomescarce. Thus, there is an increasing need for peopleto be able to control their devices from any locationat any time. Moreover, they need to be able tocontrol multiple devices at the same time. More andmore homes have networked devices, and more and morehomes have connections to the Internet. It isrelatively easy to create advanced user interfacesfor these devices, if one has a rich environment witha graphical display and keyboard or pen input. However, by far the most ubiquitous networked deviceis the plain old telephone, which has no display andonly a 12-key keypad. This book introduces aprotocol, KPML, which enables the remote control ofmultiple devices with devices that have only a 12-keykeypad.