Wireless sensor network for smart home and ambient assisted living

Abstract

A smart home is a residential setting equipped with a set of advanced electronics, sensors and automated devices specifically designed for care delivery, remote monitoring, early detection of problems or emergency cases and promotion of residential safety and quality of life. Smart home has been developed using different technology using wired and wireless network. In this project, Smart Home and Ambient Assisted Living (SHAAL) system has been developed and tested in real experimental home environment. SHAAL system is designed on wireless sensor network (WSN) linked to the cloud network on the Internet. The development of SHAAL is divided into two phases: the design of SHAAL network and the development of SHAAL applications. SHAAL network is made up of the home network which is the WSN and the cloud network. The WSN has been designed using TelG mote as the sensor mote and various sensor modules which include door module, lighting module, appliance module, alarm module, camera module and the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) module. TelG mote operates on Zigbee based network. The cloud network is made up of the gateway, the server and user devices running on third generation (3G) network. The development of SHAAL applications focuses on the smart door, smart lighting, smart appliances, smart surveillance and AAL applications. The various SHAAL applications run on different platforms which areWindows,Webbased and Android based smartphone. Since many applications may run on SHAAL network, a simple data scheduling scheme has been programmed to schedule data packets based on their application types and priorities. Results show packet reception rate is improved up to 22% using priority scheduling algorithm than the conventional First-In-First-Out method. Additionally, the performance delay of priority scheduling in the experimental test-bed is 34.2% less compared to the theoretical study. It is also shown that the proposed scheme can ensure higher throughput to the high priority data while gives sufficient access to low priority data. The implementation of the experimental testbed has proven that SHAAL has been successfully designed and deployed in the real world. SHAAL provides smart home automation and allows individuals to live independently in their preferred environment.