A home bus system is to perform concentrated monitoring and control of electric appliances positioned in a house as well as alerting users by monitoring outputs from security sensors positioned in places of consideration in the house. The appliances, and the occurrence of emergencies sensed by the security sensors, appear on the screen of a visual controller in the form of pictographs. Data about the pictographs are stored in a memory such as a graphic ROM, and once stored data are read from the memory to be displayed on the screen.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5237305.html