Smart homes, control and energy management:How do smart home technologies influence control over energy use and domestic life?

By introducing new ways of automatically and remotely controlling domestic environments smart technologies have the potential to significantly improve domestic energy management. It is argued that they will simplify users’ lives by allowing them to delegate aspects of decision-making and control - relating to energy management, security, leisure and entertainment etc. - to automated smart home systems. Whilst such technologically-optimistic visions are seductive to many, less research attention has so far been paid to how users interact with and make use of the advanced control functionality that smart homes provide within already complex everyday lives. What literature there is on domestic technology use and control, shows that control is a complex and contested concept. Far from merely controlling appliances, householders are also concerned about a wide range of broader understandings of control relating, for example, to control over security, independence, hectic schedules and even over other household members such as through parenting or care relationships. This paper draws on new quantitative and qualitative data from 4 homes involved in a smart home field trial that have been equipped with smart home systems that provide advanced control functionality over appliances and space heating. Quantitative data examines how householders have used the systems both to try and improve their energy efficiency but also for purposes such as enhanced security or scheduling appliances to align with lifestyles. Qualitative data (from in-depth interviews) explores how smart technologies have impacted upon, and were impacted by, broader understandings of control within the home. The paper concludes by proposing an analytical framework for future research on control in the smart home

Smart Home Systems Security

© 2018 IEEE. Due to the increase of the Smart Home System market, it has become important to outline and understand the direction and progress needed to ensure that, as Smart Home Systems become more common, the security and functionality of these systems. This research sheds light on what has been done in the field and Smart Home System owners feel currently about the systems they already have, the reasons behind using it as well as what could be done differently to improve its security. The results are presented from feedback received from the questionnaire to provide knowledge and understanding of how a Smart Home System can be improved, and what the main paths of future progress in this area. The ultimate aims of this work are to identify the risks associated with Smart Home Systems and investigate how the risks can be mitigated

The Vulnerability Through Cyberattacks Related to Technological Differences Between Centralized, Server-Based and Ethereum Based Smart Home Systems

Many people use the digital support of smart home systems to improve their homes\u27 comfort, security, and efficiency (Komninos et al., 2011). However, with the growing number of users comes an increasing number of security challenges that must be addressed (Albany et al., 2022). To mitigate these concerns, the smart home industry is exploring new technologies beyond the traditional centralized server model. One promising technology is the Ethereum blockchain, a distributed database technology. However, it is unclear which concrete security advantages the use of this technology offers in the smart home area. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate whether there is a correlation between the use of the technology and the security of smart home systems against cyberattacks. To accomplish this, it is examined whether an Ethereum-based smart home system can defend against a larger variety of different cyberattacks than a classic smart home system with a central server

A Survey of Lightweight Cryptosystems for Smart Home Devices

A Smart Home uses interconnected network technology to monitor the environment, control the various physical appliances, and communicate with each other in a close environment. A typical smart home is made up of a security system, intercommunication system, lighting system, and ventilation system.  Data security schemes for smart homes are ineffective due to inefficiency cryptosystems, high energy consumption, and low exchange security. Traditional cryptosystems are less-applicable because of their large block size, large key size, and complex rounds. This paper conducts a review of smart homes, and adopts Ultra-Sooner Lightweight Cryptography to secure home door. It provides extensive background of cryptography, forms of cryptography as associated issues and strengths, current trends, smart home door system design, and future works suggestions. Specifically, there are prospects of utilizing XORed lightweight cryptosystem for developing encryption and decryption algorithms in smart home devices. The Substitution Permutation Network, and Feistel Network cryptographic primitives were most advanced forms of cipher operations with security guarantees. Therefore, better security, memory and energy efficiency can be obtained with lightweight ciphers in smart home devices when compared to existing solutions. In the subsequent studies, a blockchain-based lightweight cryptography can be the next springboard in attaining the most advanced security for smart home systems and their appliances.     &nbsp

Smart-Voice Invocation of Scenes in Home-Automation Systems

Home environments are rapidly becoming more and more automated via the use of voice-recognizing personal assistants. Home-automation systems using a voice-recognizing personal assistant are capable of configuring smart devices of a home, such as lighting, security systems, or environmental controls, to particular operational settings which, when aggregated across multiple smart devices, constitute a particular scene. Techniques for a home-automation system to configure, or “set”, a scene using smart-voice invocation are described

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

HMM-based decision model for smart home environment

The smart home environment typically includes various systems with high level of heterogeneity characteristics. Smart home environment are configured in such a way that it comfort driven as well as achieving optimized security and task-oriented without human intervention inside the home. Smart home environment contain diversified systems ranging from entertainment to automation like devices that is heterogeneous in nature. For the reason that of systems heterogeneity, it is frequently challenging to execute interoperation around them and realize desired services preferred by the home occupants. The interoperation complexity stands at the bottleneck in ensuring various tasks executed jointly among diversified systems in smart home environment. In this paper, we present a Hidden-Markov Model (HMM) based decision model for smart home environment by providing decision support ability. The implementation has been carried out in such a way that quality information is acquired among the systems to demonstrate the effectiveness of interoperability among them. This proposed decision model is tested and proven that there is an elevated amount of reliability on this decision model in the smart home setting