Lessons Learned from Online Social Networking of Physical Things

Abstract—Social networking is a core part of the global online experience. The Web 2.0 has been transformed into a social Web, extending the social capabilities of users. A big challenge for the Web is to become ubiquitous, blended with the everyday life of people. The Pervasive Web would be effectively enabled when physical things are seamlessly connected to the Web, offering real-world services to users. In a previous work, we examined the feasibility of utilizing existing online social networking platforms, to create a social smart home that promotes sharing of sensor and household devices between family members. In this paper, we present some early experiences obtained from developing two real-world social applications, the first for environmental monitoring in a farm and the second for increasing energy awareness by sharing electricity consumption information between friends. Through these two deployments, we demonstrate the potential benefits of giving a social texture to pervasive applications

Ubiquitous Monitoring of Electrical Household Appliances

The number of appliances at home is increasing continuously, mainly because they make our lives easier. Currently, technology is integrated in all objects of our daily life. TCP/IP let us monitor our home in real time and check ubiquitously if something is happening at home. Bearing in mind this idea, we have developed a low-cost system, which can be used in any type of electrical household appliance that takes information from the appliance and posts the information to the Twitter Social network. Several sensors placed in the household appliances gather the sensed data and send them wired or wirelessly, depending on the case, using small and cheap devices to a gateway located in the home. This gateway takes decisions, based on the received data, and sends notifications to Twitter. We have developed a software application that takes the values and decides when to issue an alarm to the registered users (Twitter friends of our smart home). The performance of our system has been measured taking into account the home network (using IEEE 802.3u and IEEE 802.11g) and the data publishing in Twitter. As a result, we have generated an original product and service for any electrical household appliance, regardless of the model and manufacturer, that helps home users improve their quality of life. The paper also shows that there is no system with the same innovative features like the ones presented in this paper.Lloret, J.; Macias Lopez, EM.; Suarez Sarmiento, A.; Lacuesta, R. (2012). Ubiquitous Monitoring of Electrical Household Appliances. Sensors. 12(11):15159-15191. doi:10.3390/s121115159S15159151911211Aiello, M., & Dustdar, S. (2008). Are our homes ready for services? A domotic infrastructure based on the Web service stack. Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 4(4), 506-525. doi:10.1016/j.pmcj.2008.01.002Chan, M., Estève, D., Escriba, C., & Campo, E. (2008). A review of smart homes—Present state and future challenges. 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