Smart Personalized Home for Smart Living

While leaving a room, Mr. X forgot to switch off the lights! Another person Mrs. Y left the gas stove on while leaving for a party! Like these two persons, many others might be making same mistakes knowingly or unknowingly in their daily lives. What if our homes become smart enough to ensure that such mistakes do not happen in the first place? Also there are two more scenarios - one is that different individuals living is same houses have different requirements pertaining to settings of electronic devices and appliances they use based on their comfort level.

Like for example temperature settings of AC in a room that one likes or the intensity of light one likes in room or the temperature of water one likes for bathing etc; the second scenario is that what is the environment impact that one leave behind (foot print) with the usage of these appliance and electronics gadgets. We have way to measure the amount of electrical power consumption of the house. But do we have a way to measure what is the environmental impact of our usage of electronic gadgets or appliances? Or more precisely do we have a way to measure the consumption or environmental impact for each individual in a house?

The answer to all these questions could be Smart Personalized Homes working on the concept of Internet of Things (IoT). With the help of internet of things, like human beings our device can be connected and can communicate with us over the network. Together with various sensors added to the IOT enabled devices for decision making (for the tasks discussed above) will truly make the home a Smart Personalized Home.

Maher Kayal and his team at EPLF (Research institution in Lausanne, Switzerland) pushed further the concept of IoT capturing all the points or rather requirements discussed in first paragraph. A demo wall was built, which was fitted with intelligent smart lights. These intelligent lights stored the preferences of the user along with his/her identity. Whenever the user placed his/her identity card on the wall, the wall recognized his/her preferences and illuminates the room according to his/her stored preferences.

Hence to summarize, there are three components of smart homes: The first component is the electronics which need to be integrated in the appliances to make them smart. The second component is the built-in learning mechanism to control the appliances so that the appliances are well learned about the user preferences. This learning helps the user in controlling the appliance. The third component is the building and its interaction with the environment.

Smart Home is not a new thing anymore but a Personalized Smart Home is! In this modern world everyone likes to have everything personally owned instead of sharing, it just adds to the comfort. The few examples are Personal Computer (we remember those days when a single computer was shared among people, but now it is personal), Smart Phones, Hotstar (for personal Television viewing). Sooner or later there will arise a requirement where we will want personalized home which will automatically adapt to the settings of different individuals living is house, at different times. Like if Mr. X enters the room, the setting of the room change according to the taste of Mr. X and when Mrs. Y enters the room the room adapt to preferences of Mrs. Y.

By Ms. Parul Datta, Assistant Professor, CSE, Chitkara University, H.P.

References:

• http://actu.epfl.ch/news/internet-of-things-for-smarter-living/
• http://www.mit.edu/~georgios/research.html