Wellness Protocol: An Integrated Framework for Ambient Assisted Living : A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Electronics, Information and Communication Systems At School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University, Manawatu Campus, New Zealand

Listed in 2016 Dean's List of Exceptional ThesesSmart and intelligent homes of today and tomorrow are committed to enhancing the security, safety and comfort of the occupants. In the present scenario, most of the smart homes Protocols are limited to controlled activities environments for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) of the elderly and the convalescents. The aim of this research is to develop a Wellness Protocol that forecasts the wellness of any individual living in the AAL environment. This is based on wireless sensors and networks that are applied to data mining and machine learning to monitor the activities of daily living. The heterogeneous sensor and actuator nodes, based on WSNs are deployed into the home environment. These nodes generate the real-time data related to the object usage and other movements inside the home, to forecast the wellness of an individual. The new Protocol has been designed and developed to be suitable especially for the smart home system. The Protocol is reliable, efficient, flexible, and economical for wireless sensor networks based AAL. According to consumer demand, the Wellness Protocol based smart home systems can be easily installed with existing households without any significant changes and with a user-friendly interface. Additionally, the Wellness Protocol has extended to designing a smart building environment for an apartment. In the endeavour of smart home design and implementation, the Wellness Protocol deals with large data handling and interference mitigation. A Wellness based smart home monitoring system is the application of automation with integral systems of accommodation facilities to boost and progress the everyday life of an occupant

Emerging Technologies In Building Energy Efficiency

The U.S. building stock are under continuous aging and deterioration with deferred maintenance that hinders their operation. Existing buildings account for more than 86% of the annual construction cost in the U.S. and often suffer from lack of acceptable level of thermal comfort, indoor air quality (IAQ) as well as high energy use and costs. Considering future energy constraints (e.g. global warming and energy resources) and cost (e.g. capital cost and operational cost) suggest a need for a paradigm shift in our current understanding of energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of the older existing building stock. Major technological advances beyond our current knowledge are much needed to design energy efficient buildings and retrofit large numbers of buildings at scale. Our technologies advances should be converged on high performance building enclosure materials, advanced building controls, intelligent building mechanical systems, efficient building lighting fixtures, and smart building plug-load management. For example, currently, majority of the residential buildings and a significant number of commercial buildings in the U.S. do not have any building automation systems, suggesting an emerging need to develop low-cost building automation systems specifically for residential buildings. This presentation covers a wide range of much needed technological advances on different building components and systems in order to design energy efficient buildings or retrofit large numbers of buildings. The aim of this presentation is not only to provide opportunities to reduce energy consumption in older existing buildings but also to shed light on new solutions to harvest energy through buildings

Development of a toolkit for component-based automation systems

From the earliest days of mass production in the automotive industry there has been a progressive move towards the use of flexible manufacturing systems that cater for product variants that meet market demands. In recent years this market has become more demanding with pressures from legislation, globalisation and increased customer expectations. This has lead to the current trends of mass customisation in production. In order to support this manufacturing systems are not only becoming more flexible† to cope with the increased product variants, but also more agile‡ such that they may respond more rapidly to market changes. Modularisation§ is widely used to increase the agility of automation systems, such that they may be more readily reconfigured¶. Also with globalisation into India and Asia semi-automatic machines (machines that interact with human operators) are more frequently used to reduce capital outlay and increase flexibility. There is an increasing need for tools and methodologies that support this in order to improve design robustness, reduce design time and gain a competitive edge in the market. The research presented in this thesis is built upon the work from COMPAG/COMPANION (COMponent- based Paradigm for AGile automation, and COmmon Model for PArtNers in automatION), and as part of the BDA (Business Driven Automation), SOCRADES (Service Oriented Cross-layer infrastructure for Distributed smart Embedded deviceS), and IMC-AESOP (ArchitecturE for Service- Oriented Process – monitoring and control) projects conducted at Loughborough University UK. This research details the design and implementation of a toolkit for building and simulating automation systems comprising components with behaviour described using Finite State Machines (FSM). The research focus is the development of the engineering toolkit that can support the automation system lifecycle from initial design through commissioning to maintenance and reconfiguration as well as the integration of a virtual human. This is achieved using a novel data structure that supports component definitions for control, simulation, maintenance and the novel integration of a virtual human into the automation system operation

Integrating Features of Islamic Traditional Home and Smart Home

Architecture is a mirror that reflects the various elements of its environment and surroundings, such as climate, geographical characteristics, standard architectural principles, and social, cultural and scientific developments. Muslims of different regions were able, through architecture, to portray their temperaments and environments, free of external influence and guarantee life goals for users. Every day, building owners and occupants experience the constant challenges of comfort, convenience, cost, productivity, performance and sustainability. Owners, designers, builders, and operators are continuously faced with new processes, technologies and offerings to help them achieve better building performance. Since an intelligent building is run by a “system of systems” that is integrated to deliver a higher level of operational efficiency and an improved set of user-interface tools than are usually found in traditional building automation; at the other hand Arab homes with Islamic Identity guarantee all life goals for use.. Hence, this research focus on the smart environmental treatments of Islamic features for traditional architecture in Arabs homes, features of smart home and life goals for resident users.Trying to achieve a methodology combining them for enriching Arab experience of traditional architecture and its architectural results, with the modern trends of smart architecture. This combination aims at creating a residential model combining the benefits and features of Arab Islamic identity and intelligent design

Modeling Off-the-Shelf Pan/Tilt Cameras for Active Vision Systems

There are many existing multicamera systems that perform object identification and track ing. Some applications include but are not limited to security surveillance and smart rooms. Yet there is still much work to be done in improving such systems to achieve a high level of automation while obtaining reasonable performance. Thus far design and implementation of these systems has been done using heuristic methods, primarily due to the complexity of the problem. Most importantiy, the performance of these systems is assessed by evaluating subjective quantities. The goal of this work is to take the first step in structured analysis and design of multicamera systems, that is, to introduce a model of a single camera with asso ciated image processing algorithms capable of tracking a target. A single camera model is developed such that it could be easily used as a building block for a multicamera system

IP Based Module for Building Automation System

Embedded systems technology has a lot of applications in the various fields of life to bring ease and comfort for humans. One kind of applications is in the development of modern buildings, where embedded systems are applied to the control system. Building Automation Systems (BAS) are often encountered in modern buildings today. They are responsible to automatically control the building appliances such as electrical equipments, fire alarms, security systems, and others. Conventionally, a smart home that can be controlled by an embedded system is connected to a central monitoring unit such as a computer. The system commonly employs RS232 or RS485 serial communication, so that the control activities cannot be carried out from a long distance. With the rapid technology development in the field of communication, many recent communication devices are practical and have a good performance. One of them is a device with the Android operating system that can access the internet, thus it has a significant role in simplifying the management of smart homes. This research proposes the design of a smart home that can conserve energy by turning off unneeded electrical appliances, detect disorders such as flood, fire, and theft, and also serve as an early warning system through SMS Gateway. It can be monitored and controlled remotely over the Internet by an Android device

Determination of the influence of specific building regulations in smart buildings

The automation of domestic services began to be implemented in buildings since the late nineteenth century, and today we are used to terms like ‘intelligent buildings’, ‘digital home’ or ‘domotic buildings’. These concepts tell us about constructions which integrate new technologies in order to improve comfort, optimize energy consumption or enhance the security of users. In conjunction, building regulations have been updated to suit the needs of society and to regulate these new facilities in such structures. However, we are not always sure about how far, from the quantitative or qualitative point of view, legislation should regulate certain aspects of the building activity. Consequently, content analysis is adopted in this research to determine the influence of building regulations in the implementation of new technologies in the construction process. This study includes the analysis of different European regulations, the collection and documentation of such guidelines that have been established and a study of the impact that all of these have had in the way we start thinking an architectural project. The achievements of the research could be explained in terms of the regulatory requirements that must be taken into account in order to achieve a successful implementation of a home automation system, and the key finding has been the confirmation of how the design of smart buildings may be promoted through specific regulatory requirements while other factors, such as the global economic situation, do not seem to affect directly the rate of penetration of home automation in construction

Joint Model Predictive Control of Electric and Heating Resources in a Smart Building

The new challenge in power systems design and operation is to organize and control smart micro grids supplying aggregation of users and special loads as electric vehicles charging stations. The presence of renewable and storage can help the optimal operation only if a good control manages all the elements of the grid. New models of green buildings and energy communities are proposed. For a real application they need an appropriate and advanced power system equipped with a building automation control system. This article presents an economic model predictive control approach to the problem of managing the electric and heating resources in a smart building in a coordinated way, for the purpose of achieving in real time nearly zero energy consumption and automated participation to demand response programs. The proposed control, leveraging a mixed integer quadratic programming problem, allows to meet manifold thermal and electric users' requirements and react to inbound demand response signals, while still guaranteeing stable operation of the building's electric and thermal storage equipment. The simulation results, performed for a real case study in Italy, highlight the peculiarities of the proposed approach in the joint handling of electric and thermal building flexibility

HolonCraft-An Architecture for Dynamic Construction of Smart Home Workflows

Smart home systems have developed rapidly and entered the daily lives of many people. However, it is difficult for products from different manufacturers to work together due to the interoperability barriers posed by divergent hardware, communication protocols and APIs. In this paper, we introduce HolonCraft as a tool to help the regular IoT user in building complex systems. HolonCraft builds on the Holon ontology which enables systems to share their descriptions so that devices can recognize and understand each other and their respective functions, and work together through composing a system of systems (SoS) at runtime to fulfill a given user workflow. HolonCraft extends the machine-readable information provided by the Holon ontology and uses open-source editors (namely Google Blockly and Microsoft Monaco) to implement a cross-platform graphical programming editor for smart home automation. HolonCraft automatically transforms device capabilities into visual programming elements, enabling users without programming backgrounds to design smart home automation through simple drag-And-drop operations while also supporting advanced programming features such as branches, loops and functions. It then type-checks the composed workflow and, accordingly, generates code to actualize it. In consequence, HolonCraft dramatically improves the abstraction and expressiveness of automation as indicated by our user experiments