Sensor Network-based and User-friendly User Location Discovery for Future Smart Homes

User location is crucial context information for future smart homes where a lot of location based services will be proposed. This location necessarily means that User Location Discovery (ULD) will play an important role in future smart homes. Concerns about privacy and the need to carry a mobile or a tag device within a smart home currently makes conventional ULD systems uncomfortable for users. Future smart homes will need a ULD system to consider these challenges. This paper addresses to design such a ULD system for context-aware services in future smart homes stressing on the following challenges: (i) users’ privacy, (ii) device/tag-free, and (iii) fault tolerance and accuracy. On the other hand, emerging new technologies such as Internet of Things, embedded systems, intelligent devices and machine-to-machine communication are penetrating into our daily life with more and more sensors available for use in our homes. Considering this opportunity, we propose a ULD system that is capitalizing on the prevalence of sensors or home while satisfying the aforementioned challenges. The proposed sensor network-based and user-friendly ULD system relies on different types of cheap sensors as well as a context broker with a fuzzy-based decision maker. The context broker receives context information from different types of sensors and evaluates that data using the fuzzy set theory. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed system by illustrating a use case, utilizing both an analytical model and simulation

Enabling Machine Understandable Exchange of Energy Consumption Information in Intelligent Domotic Environments

In the 21st century, all the major countries around the world are coming together to reduce the impact of energy generation and consumption on the global environment. Energy conservation and its efficient usage has become a top agenda on the desks of many governments. In the last decade, the drive to make homes automated and to deliver a better assisted living picked pace and the research into home automation systems accelerated, usually based on a centralized residential gateway. However most devised solutions fail to provide users with information about power consumption of different house appliances. The ability to collect power consumption information can lead us to have a more energy efficient society. The goal addressed in this paper is to enable residential gateways to provide the energy consumption information, in a machine understandable format, to support third party applications and services. To reach this goal, we propose a Semantic Energy Information Publishing Framework. The proposed framework publishes, for different appliances in the house, their power consumption information and other properties, in a machine understandable format. Appliance properties are exposed according to the existing semantic modeling supported by residential gateways, while instantaneous power consumption is modeled through a new modular Energy Profile ontolog

Fostering energy awareness in residential homes using mobile devices

There is considerable global effort being made towards identifying ways of reducing energy consumption to cope with growing demands. Although there is potential for energy saving in many sectors, our focus is on reducing energy consumption in residential homes. We have developed a system which combines home automation and energy usage monitoring technologies. The system offers a range of tools designed for mobile devices to assist users with monitoring their energy usage and provides mechanisms for setting up and controlling home appliances to conserve energy. In this paper we describe our system and a user study we have conducted to evaluate its effectiveness. The findings of the study show the potential benefits of this type of mobile technology

Multimodal and ubiquitous computing systems: supporting independent-living older users

We document the rationale and design of a multimodal interface to a pervasive/ubiquitous computing system that supports independent living by older people in their own homes. The Millennium Home system involves fitting a resident’s home with sensors – these sensors can be used to trigger sequences of interaction with the resident to warn them about dangerous events, or to check if they need external help. We draw lessons from the design process and conclude the paper with implications for the design of multimodal interfaces to ubiquitous systems developed for the elderly and in healthcare, as well as for more general ubiquitous computing applications

Harnessing technology: the learner and their context: choosing to use technology: how learners construct their learning lives in their own contexts: key findings from the first year of research

This report covers the findings from the first year of the learners and their context research and highlights emerging findings including; choosing to use technology and how learners construct their learning lives in their own contexts

Surveying human habit modeling and mining techniques in smart spaces

A smart space is an environment, mainly equipped with Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, able to provide services to humans, helping them to perform daily tasks by monitoring the space and autonomously executing actions, giving suggestions and sending alarms. Approaches suggested in the literature may differ in terms of required facilities, possible applications, amount of human intervention required, ability to support multiple users at the same time adapting to changing needs. In this paper, we propose a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that classifies most influential approaches in the area of smart spaces according to a set of dimensions identified by answering a set of research questions. These dimensions allow to choose a specific method or approach according to available sensors, amount of labeled data, need for visual analysis, requirements in terms of enactment and decision-making on the environment. Additionally, the paper identifies a set of challenges to be addressed by future research in the field