Unifying the Smart Home Experience Through HbbTVenabled Devices In the current context of seamless integration for a variety of devices within the Smart Home concept, the home TV screen has gained again a pivotal role in everyday life, acting as a central hub for audio and video broadcasting services, home automation and other devices, including smartphones, tablets and IoT  enabled devices. In this context, a standard compliant and platform independent solution for the television device is preferred as it can ensure a dynamic environment in which various devices are able to contribute to the overall user experience. This paper proposes an architecture which seamlessly integrates the consumerxe2x80x99s phone and a smart home environment with a HbbTVenabled television set, using the HbbTV 2.0 Companions Screen and Multimedia Synchronization framework. A first architectural design and its hardware implementation have been developed and deployed as a proof of concept. An initial set of tests has been conducted in order to assess the benefits of the proposed system.

Usability Barriers in Smart TV User Interfaces: A Review and Recommendations Smart TV is a television set that has the capabilities of processing, storage, and connectivity. Besides these features, smart TV brings appbased entertainment, which is beyond the scope of legacy TV systems. Being a connected device, smart TV is facing numerous challenges not only in the form of security and privacy but also usability and accessibility. For example, a smart TV has access to diverse data sources. Therefore, searching for desired content on a smart TV is difficult and timeconsuming. Although, Electronic Program Guides (EPGs) provide some facilities for searching desired contents; yet, scrolling a long list of programs is not welcomed by the viewers. In this paper, we are reviewing the inter and intraapp navigational complexities and their effects on usability, learnability, and cognition. Although, smart TV manufacturers are trying to produce smart TVs with simple to use interfaces; yet, the existing smart TVs interfaces have accessibility and usability issues that are discussed in this paper. This paper further presents some recommendations and guidelines for the design of a universal user interface for smart TV.