A System for Controlling, Monitoring and Programming the Home

As technology becomes ever more pervasive, the challenges of home automation are increasingly apparent. Seamless home control, home monitoring and home programming by the end user have yet to enter the mainstream. This could be attributed to the challenge of developing a fully autonomous and extensible home system that can support devices and technologies of differing protocols and functionalities. In order to offer programming facilities to the user, the underlying rule system must be fully independent, allowing support for current and future devices. Additional challenges arise from the need to detect and handle conflicts that may arise among user rules and yield undesirable results. Non-technical individuals typically struggle when faced with a programming task. It is therefore vital to encourage and ease the process of programming the home. This thesis presents Homer, a home system that has been developed to support three key features of a home system: control, monitoring and programming. Homer supports any third-party hardware or software service that can expose its functionality through Java and conform to the Homer interface. Stand-alone end user interfaces can be written by developers to offer any of Homer's functionality. Where policies (i.e. rules) for the home are concerned, Homer offers a fully independent policy system. The thesis presents a custom policy language, Homeric, that has been designed specifically for writing home rules. The Homer policy system detects overlaps and conflicts among rules using constraint satisfaction and the effect on environment variables. The thesis also introduces the notion of perspectives to ease user interactivity. These have been integrated into Homer to accommodate the range of ways in which a user may think about different aspects and features of their home. These perspectives include location, device type, time and people-oriented points of view. Design guidelines are also discussed to aid end user programming of the home. The work presented in this thesis demonstrates a system that supports control, monitoring and programming of the home. Developers can quickly and easily add functionality to the home through components. Conflicts can be detected amongst rules within the home. Finally, design guidelines and a prototype interface have been developed to allow both technically minded and non-technical people to program their home

Programming Home Care

The home is composed of many different devices, services and technologies. These rarely communicate with one another, and require various different computer systems and applications to be able to interact with them all remotely. A challenge within telecare is being able to exploit the functionality of these devices within the home and offer a common means of control, monitoring and programming, either locally or remotely. Homer, a home system designed and developed at the University of Stirling, can communicate with any device within the home and then expose the functionality to a range of different interfaces on different platforms and devices. This paper introduces Homer, describing how it communicates with the devices within the home, a brief description of the system architecture, and finally describes its user interfaces for the home. Home requirements are introduced at the beginning of the paper, explored throughout, and finally evaluated at the end

Pervasive Computing for Home Automation and Telecare

This chapter discusses how pervasive computing is being used in the home as a technique for managing home automation and telecare. The context and motivation are discussed for the work in these fields. The technical background covers standards, platforms, management and interfaces for home systems. As a particular but typical example, the Homer system being developed at the University of Stirling is described. The philosophy and architecture of this system are explained. The nature of home components is discussed, along with how they fit together into the overall system. Event logic can be used to map between low-level and high-level component events. At policy level, automated decisions based on user-defined rules are made about control of the home system. At goal level, users formulate high-level objectives that are realised through policies. User-friendly interfaces for home management are then presented. Finally, the chapter summarises what has been covered, evaluates the current status of home automation and telecare, and identifies trends and future developments in these fields

A Configurable Telecare System

The Homer system for telecare and home automation is described. Core capabilities are shared between these applications, supplemented by application-specific devices and services. Current home systems do not support simple, yet sophisticated, ways of controlling the home in a generic high-level way. In contrast, Homer is designed to make it easy for non-technical users to achieve this. Developers create home components that expose their services and functionality in a way that encourages combination. Components are made accessible to end-user applications through an HTTP interface, allowing use of any interface technology. Internally, Homer supports automation through policies that combine the functionalities and services offered by components. These policies can be created using many kinds of user interfaces. The Homer architecture, components, policies and user interfaces are discussed. Finally, the paper concludes with an evaluation of the work in comparison to similar systems

A Component Framework for Telecare and Home Automation

Many sensors, appliances and smart devices for within the home are becoming readily available to the general public. These can not only enhance everyday living but also allow people requiring care to stay in the comfort of their own homes for longer. Users need to be provided with the ability to easily customise their home and the devices within it. A Service Component Architecture is described for representing various services within a home environment. The resulting system has a simple plug-and-play mechanism for easy addition and integration of a range of components. A collection of services is presented using both off-the-shelf and novel components