Intelligent System for Home Automation
Home automation solutions – such as centralized control over lights, air conditioning and appliances – seek to improve the quality of life of the residents by giving them control over the different systems in the house with just the push of a button. Taking advantage of this technology, the intelligent home goes even one step further; automating the decision making process and operating the house systems based on information obtained from the environment.
ISHA: Intelligent System for Home Automation
Our intelligent home will be implemented as a wireless home network, with every device in the house being a node (or connection point) of this network. Even the home residents, by carrying wearable sensors, will belong to the home network. The nodes will be continually collecting data from the environment and ISHA will react based on the information obtained.
Users will be able to interact with the intelligent home by using a computer, smartphone or tablet, as well as by giving the house direct voice or gesture commands.
Node Localization
One of the novel features to be implemented in ISHA is that of node localization, which will allow our system to know the location of all the devices in the house. This means that our intelligent home will not only be collecting data from its surroundings, but it will also know where this data is being obtained and it will react differently depending on the location. Node location information will, essentially, make the intelligent home even more intelligent. How? A simple example will illustrate it better.
You are sitting in your living room watching television. ISHA detects that your body temperature is raising and your heartbeat is getting faster. The house detects that you are in the living room and turns on the air conditioning only in that room.
Not only has the house made you more comfortable by lowering the temperature, but it is also being energy-efficient by only turning on the AC on the specific room where you currently are.
For this to work, the location information has to be very precise; the kind of precision that is usually very expensive. To overcome this, our proposed approach uses multilateration – the same technology used in GPS – to obtain the coordinates of the nodes inside our home network.
However, GPS measurements have errors ranging from 4 meters to 10 meters. That could be the difference between your home and your neighbor’s home! While GPS uses 3 reference satellites to calculate your location when you are driving, our system will reduce the error by using most of the available reference nodes to calculate a target’s location.
Benefits of ISHA
