Design And Implementation Of Family Messaging System Based On Android Smart Set-top Box

With the rapid development of the communication technique in the mobile field and the terminals in smart phones, the way by which people communicate with each other has experienced big changes:from using messages and calls at the beginning to that based on all kinds of social apps which provide more frequent and close interactions. Mobile social messaging apps such as QQ, Wechat, and Facebook have built up the relationship framework through which we convey our emotion. However, the social apps like Wechat could easily miss certain users who are not good at controlling smartphones and are more interested in watching TVs for entertainment, such as those middle aged to aged people in less developed and small cities.The society is aging and more people are living in long-distance place away from their parents. There is a dramatic increase of purchasing of Set-top boxes and smart Televisions with the function of IPTV, internet, somatosensory, and video; and they have replaced the traditional televisions with limited functions as the fundamental requirements for family entertainment. In this study, we develop the Android smart Set-top box based Social and Familial Affection System (SFAS), in order to meet the needs of familial and social communications for these middle aged to aged people. The SFAS helps this group of people to communicate easily with their children, relatives and friends at any time and place, with some simple remote sensing controls and operates.The SFAS consists of two user terminals:smartphone terminal (or Phone terminal) and smart Set-top box terminal (or TV terminal). Interactions between Phone-Phone, TV-TV and Phone-TV terminals are made possible. The SFAS first guides users how to control the system, then displays the entrance of the main modules (e.g., contacts, message,share, events, recommendations, and personal settings). Users can search and manage their contact list. They can send and receive text messages, pictures and small video messages. In addition, they can make voice or video chats in the SFAS. Furthermore, they can modify their self-informations such as cellphone number and birthday and so on. Phone terminal and.TV terminal can be bound together by scanning a QR code shown on the setting page.The design of the SFAS system considers fully of the smart TV’s special features, using C/S architecture, MVC model, following the design principles of software engineering.This paper completely describes the design and implementation of the SFAS system though several aspects:the requirement analysis of the system, the whole design of the system, the detailed design of the system and the implementation ofthe system, software testing methods of the system. The SFAS system is developed using the Eclipse IDE, in the server. In terms of the datapersistence, MySql database is used in the server teminal, SQLite database for Android is used to save data for the client.Smart TVs usually provide larger screens with high definition whitch is convience for elder people to view long texts or images.Because of this kind of advantage, smart TV is much more suitable than mobile phone to develop family social applications.Numerous users have gained a lot of pleasure from this system since we put it into the market.