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Implementation of smart automated systems are gradually increasing globally. Some of the applications of these devices include providing rapid information, automated healthcare facility, and home automation. The rising global population has also forced different organizations to move towards automated systems to serve their users. Among these devices, the kiosk stands out due to its usability and capability to deliver data without any external help (Sad et al., 2020).
The kiosk is an automated electric device that uses different modern hardware and software to ensure a wide range of features such as wayfinding, advertising, hospitality, and health check-in (Joshi et al., 2017). Currently, they are used almost everywhere starting from schools to large offices to ensure a seamless user experience without the need for any sort of human assistance. As reported in the literatures, kiosks have seen their application in markets (Rajendran, 2018), universities (Ekşioğlu et al., 2018), restaurants (Han et al., 2019), and healthcare (Afzali et al., 2017; Gladia & Kavya, 2017). In addition to that, researchers are also assessing the usability of the kiosks for virtual reality development (Graham et al., 2018) and laboratories (Branzila et al., 2018). Another type of kiosk that is widely used in different organizations to rectify their operation is known as the information kiosk.
An operating system is a major part of every information kiosk as they control the overall working of the system and a user-friendly operating system can easily improve user interaction, which is the primary objective of any kiosk. In the case of an information kiosk, a fast operation is necessary as most of the time they are placed in crowded areas. So, choosing an appropriate operating system can be challenging. In this research, a Linux kernel based operating system was developed that can handle the challenges in any information kiosk. The hardware requirements of the OS have been kept low so that it can be installed almost on every system. The key contributions of this research are:
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Development of a Linux kernel based operating system for information kiosk.
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Implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) within the operating system.
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Improving hardware resource utilization for kiosk operating system to ensure constant performance.
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Development of a responsive UI that changes based on user.
The proposed solution mainly focuses on the user experience and user’s comfort in using a kiosk. The developed OS eliminates the unnecessary background process in the system and thus, making the device faster in fetching or delivering data. The dynamicity of the system enables to design the UI as per the individual requirements of any organization. Furthermore, the combination of embedded systems with multiple sensors enables the device with more features. The combination of AI and attractive UI makes the system more unique compared to the available kiosk devices found in the market. The OS also utilizes power more efficiently by reducing wastage of power by the device. Programs like 3D visualization of an organization’s area or building significantly increase the users’ satisfaction in using the Nekray installed kiosk devices. With a quite low specifications requirement, the Nekray OS enables the advantage of installing within a much cheaper and widely available microcontroller like the raspberry pi. Therefore, the proposed solution can be used in almost every organization in kiosk devices with a much lower installation cost and having greater advantages on multiple aspects.
The paper is organized as follows. The “Related Research Work” section highlights the recent developments in the field of IoT and illustrates different applications of the Linux operating system. The development of the operating system has been shown in the “OS Architecture” section. The “Custom Feature Development” section showcases different features that were developed for an information kiosk to run on the developed operating system. Various operations and features of the OS have been shown in the “Results” section. Finally, a summary of the overall research has been provided in the “Conclusion” section.