Ubiquitous Reach and Remote Control Of Devices

People find themselves commuting longer and longer times to work or traveling away from home. Many families have both parents working. Time dedicated for household chores and monitoring has become scarce. Thus, there is an increasing need for people to be able to control their devices from any location at any time. Moreover, they need to be able to control multiple devices at the same time. More and more homes have networked devices, and more and more homes have connections to the Internet. It is relatively easy to create advanced user interfaces for these devices, if one has a rich environment with a graphical display and keyboard or pen input. However, by far the most ubiquitous networked device is the plain old telephone, which has no display and only a 12-key keypad. This book introduces a protocol, KPML, which enables the remote control of multiple devices with devices that have only a 12-key keypad.