Smart homes and their users:a systematic analysis and key challenges

Published research on smart homes and their users is growing exponentially, yet a clear understanding of who these users are and how they might use smart home technologies is missing from a field being overwhelmingly pushed by technology developers. Through a systematic analysis of peer-reviewed literature on smart homes and their users, this paper takes stock of the dominant research themes and the linkages and disconnects between them. Key findings within each of nine themes are analysed, grouped into three: (1) views of the smart home-functional, instrumental, socio-technical; (2) users and the use of the smart home-prospective users, interactions and decisions, using technologies in the home; and (3) challenges for realising the smart home-hardware and software, design, domestication. These themes are integrated into an organising framework for future research that identifies the presence or absence of cross-cutting relationships between different understandings of smart homes and their users. The usefulness of the organising framework is illustrated in relation to two major concerns-privacy and control-that have been narrowly interpreted to date, precluding deeper insights and potential solutions. Future research on smart homes and their users can benefit by exploring and developing cross-cutting relationships between the research themes identified

The Role of Web Services at Home

The increase in computational power and the networking abilities of home appliances are revolutionizing the way we interact with our homes. This trend is growing stronger and opening a number of technological challenges. From the point of view of distributed systems, there is a need to design architectures for enhancing the comfort and safety of the home, which deal with issues of heterogeneity, scalability and openness. By considering the evolution of domotic research and projects, we advocate a role for web services in the domestic network, and propose an infrastructure based on web services. As a case study, we present an implementation for monitoring the health of an elder adult using multiple sensors and clients

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

Activity Recognition using Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models on Streaming Sensor Data

Activity recognition from sensor data deals with various challenges, such as overlapping activities, activity labeling, and activity detection. Although each challenge in the field of recognition has great importance, the most important one refers to online activity recognition. The present study tries to use online hierarchical hidden Markov model to detect an activity on the stream of sensor data which can predict the activity in the environment with any sensor event. The activity recognition samples were labeled by the statistical features such as the duration of activity. The results of our proposed method test on two different datasets of smart homes in the real world showed that one dataset has improved 4% and reached (59%) while the results reached 64.6% for the other data by using the best methods

Non-Invasive Ambient Intelligence in Real Life: Dealing with Noisy Patterns to Help Older People

This paper aims to contribute to the field of ambient intelligence from the perspective of real environments, where noise levels in datasets are significant, by showing how machine learning techniques can contribute to the knowledge creation, by promoting software sensors. The created knowledge can be actionable to develop features helping to deal with problems related to minimally labelled datasets. A case study is presented and analysed, looking to infer high-level rules, which can help to anticipate abnormal activities, and potential benefits of the integration of these technologies are discussed in this context. The contribution also aims to analyse the usage of the models for the transfer of knowledge when different sensors with different settings contribute to the noise levels. Finally, based on the authors’ experience, a framework proposal for creating valuable and aggregated knowledge is depicted.This research was partially funded by Fundación Tecnalia Research & Innovation, and J.O.-M. also wants to recognise the support obtained from the EU RFCS program through project number 793505 ‘4.0 Lean system integrating workers and processes (WISEST)’ and from the grant PRX18/00036 given by the Spanish Secretaría de Estado de Universidades, Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación del Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades

Broadband : towards a national plan for Scotland

The development of national broadband plans has been used by many countries to join up different areas of governmental and regulatory activities and to set ambitious targets for ubiquitous access to and use of the latest fixed and wireless networks and services. For Scotland this requires working within EU and UK legislative frameworks, which have also provided the bulk of the finance for interventions. It also requires an understanding of the significant weaknesses of urban broadband adoption compared to other UK and EU nations and of its e-commerce supply and demand. While resources are being targeted at rural and remote areas, more are needed to close the social digital divide, which is unavoidable if the stated ambition of being world class is to be achieved

Pervasive Technologies and Support for Independent Living

A broad range of pervasive technologies are used in many domains, including healthcare: however, there appears to be little work examining the role of such technologies in the home, or the different wants and needs of elderly users. Additionally, there exist ethical issues surrounding the use of highly personal healthcare-related data, and interface issues centred on the novelty of the technologies and the disabilities experienced by the users. This report examines these areas, before considering the ways in which they might come together to help support independent-living users with disabilities which may be age-related