Related Works
2.2 Smart Home Concept
In September 2003, Housing Learning &Improvement Network Lab, which has carried out the project named DTI Smart Homes Project, published a smart home definition offered by Intertek. Intertek considered that a smart home is ”a dwelling incorporating a communications network that connects the key electrical appliances and services, and allows them to be remotely controlled, monitored or accessed”. Remotely here means both are within the house and from outside the house. Doubtless, a home, which is smart, must contain three major elements: networking, intelligent control and home automation. An
internal network is the basis of a smart home, and it can be wired or wireless. Intelligent control means a centralized control center to manage the systems. Home automation means most of home appliances could be control remotely and intelligently.
Figure 2.3: A schemtic model of a technical structure of a Smart Home
The Figure 2.3 which is proposed by Ilse Bierhoff [6] indicates that a Smart Home environment basically contains four components and a residential gateway. This smart home environment includes Home Automation Systems, Security Systems, Multimedia Systems, and Communication Systems. The residential gateway is a centralized control center of the smart home system and also connects to outside network to enhance its capability. All functions of the smart home system can communicate with the residential gateway. Mostly speaking, the gateway supports Internet access. Host can use PDA or other handheld system to monitor house. In the following two sections, we’ll introduce related projects of smart home applications.
2.2.1 Wireless Sensor Network for Health Monitoring
A network architecture for smart healthcare based on WSNs is proposed by Virone et al.[5]. It targets assisted-living resident and others who may benefit from continuous, remote health monitoring.
Figure 2.4: Multi-tierd system archtecture of Health Monitoring
The system architecture of that project is illustrated in Figure 2.4. There are three tiers in this system: Body Networks, Emplaced Sensor Networks, and Backbone Networks.
The body network and its subsystem are tiny portable devices within a variety of sensors that perform biophysical monitoring, patient identification, location detection, etc.. The energy consumption of these sensor nodes is optimized. The emplaced sensor network includes sensor devices deployed in the environment to support sensing and monitoring.
It also provides a spatial context for data association and analysis. Nodes in emplaced sensor network do not perform extensive calculations or store data. Emplaced sensor
net-work interfaces to multiple body netnet-works, seamlessly managing handoff of reported data and maintaining patient presence information. A backbone network connects traditional systems to the emplaced sensor network, such as PDAs, PCs and databases. These nodes process significant storage and computation capability for query processing and location services. The backbone may communicate wirelessly or overlay onto an existing wired infrastructure. Yet, the count of backbone network is minimized to reduce cost. The back-end database connected by a backbone node is dedicated for long-term archiving and data mining. Human interface interfaces with the network using PDAs, wearable de-vices. These are used for data management, querying, object location, memory aids, and configuration. Caregivers can use these to specify medical sensing and to view important data.
2.2.2 UbiQ Smart Home Solution
The UbiQ is a commercial product of Smart Home Solution [17]. The system archi-tecture of UbiQ is shown in Figure 2.5. This system is divided into several components.
A Home Terminal is responsible for centrally controlling all appliances in the system and other components, communicating with the home terminal through wired medium. Room controller is responsible for controlling the room access and checking the identification of hosts. Energy controller controls the curtain and other electric devices. A set of home security devices, such as reed switch, gas sensor, etc., are directly controlled by the home terminal. There is a scenario controller which performs controlling lighting relay or tem-perature sensor according to scenario configuration. Host can remotly monitor the house
Figure 2.5: UbiQ Smart Home solution condition by a handheld device.
2.2.3 Gator Tech Smart House
The project’s[19] goal is to create assistive environments. To create the Gator Tech Smart House, the author proposed generic reference architecture applicable to any per-vasive computing space. As Figure 2.6 shows, the middleware contains separate physical, sensor platform, service, knowledge, context management, and application layers. Phys-ical layer consists of the various devices and appliances the occupants use. In sensor platform layer, each sensor platform defines the boundary of a pervasive space within the Smart House, “capturing” those object attached to it. Service layer contains the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) framework, which maintains leases of activated ser-vices. Context management layer lets application developers create and register contexts of interest. The context engine is responsible for detecting, and possibly recovering from,
Figure 2.6: Smart-space middleware.
such states. Application layer consists of an application manager to activate and deac-tivate services and a graphical-based integrated development environment with various tools to help create smart spaces.
Moreover, the author proposed smart plugs, which provide an intelligent way to sense electrical devices installed in an intelligent space. Each power outlet in the Gator Tech Smart House is equipped with a low-cost RFID reader connected to the main computer.
Electrical devices with power cords, such as lamps and clocks, each have an RFID tag attached to the plug’s end with information about the device. When a user plugs the device into an outlet, the reader reads the tag and forwards the data to the main computer.