SMART HOMES-AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE

GUDURU MOUNIKA

JANUARY, 2015

ABSTRACT:

Ambient Intelligence is an emerging discipline that brings intelligence to our everyday environments and makes those environments sensitive to us. Ambient Intelligence research builds upon advances in sensors and sensor networks,pervasive computing, and artificial intelligence. Because these contributingfields have experienced tremendous growth in the last few years, Ambient Intelligence research has strengthened and expanded.

Overview:

More and more people makedecisions based on the effect theiractions will have on their own inner,mental world. This experience-driven wayof acting is a change from the past whenpeople were primarily concerned aboutthe use value of products and servicesand is the basis for the experienceeconomy. Ambient intelligence addressesthis shift in existential view byemphasizing people and user experience.

Ambient Intelligence:

Ambient intelligence is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities.

As opposed to the desktop paradigm, in which a single user consciously engages a single device for a specialized purpose, someone "using" Ambient intelligence engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so.

SMART HOMES:

Why smart homes?

There can be many reasons for having a “Smart home”. But the most important reasons would be1) Safety and Security 2) Assisted Living for the older people 3) Luxury (Home of the future)

Safety and security form the basicnecessities of the present culture. So this part has become a part of infrastructure of most homes at present.Smoke detectors are available in the

market from 10euros to 150euros. Similarly burglar Alarms are also available in the market.

Assisted Living seeks to address

the needs of the ageing population by making life easier for them. There are many different types of research going on in this field. Some of them are mentioned here. One method adopted is tocontinuously update the status of the person’s health to the family doctor. This is done in two main steps. The person is reminded to take his tests by the set of communication devices which are linked together and upon taking the tests the results are sent to the Clinic. If the person has a sudden problem, the doctor can easily assist ashe has access to the health trend of hispatient.

Smart Homes – Luxury-What would itbe like to live in a house with a showersmart enough to regulate the water temperature? How about having a mailbox

that senses when mail arrives. Samsung has already realized the importance of smart homes. Samsung has a research interest for smart living. According to it Smart living is where the house actually understands what the user wants...

Sensor Technologies for Assisted Living Systems Integrated Health Monitoring andEmergency Call System:

To define risk incidents the system should rely on detecting vital signs changes. This way the system wouldbe transparent without requiring any special skill from the user. From a medical point of view, it’s well-known that vital signs (temperature, pulse andblood pressure) are strongly altered after an accident. For example, if somebody falls down breaks a bone and loses their consciousness, due to the need of sending more blood to the brain,the body temperature and pulse are increased quickly. Through proper monitoring of those constants, it is possible to detect what has happened andcall to notify the event.

One of the key characteristics of devices in an Ambient Intelligence environment is that they must know the context in which they are being used. Screens, for example, become very general-purpose devices, capable of displaying high quality video and graphics when needed, or transforming themselves into transparent windows or mirrors. To configure themselves correctly without user intervention,

they must know what they are being used for.

These include five control devicesfor five different lights (one fluorescent, two floor lights and two dimmable lights), a door opening mechanism, several smart identity cards,a radio tuner, a TV set, microphones, speakers, an IP video camera and two flat screens. These sensors and devices are connected to an network and the combination of these devices are used tocreate a smart environment

Many first-generation pervasive computing systems lack the ability to evolve as new technologies emerge or as an application domain matures. Programmable pervasive spaces, such as the Gator Tech Smart House, offer a scalable, cost effective way to develop and deploy extensible smart technologies.

Example scenario:

Ellen returns home after a long day's work. At the front door she is recognized by an intelligent surveillance camera, the door alarm is switched off, and the door unlocks and opens. When she enters the hall the house map indicates that her husband Peter is at an art fair in Paris, and that her daughter Charlotte is in the children's playroom, where she is playing with an interactive screen. The remote children surveillance service is notified that she is at home, and subsequently the on-line connection is switched off. When she enters the kitchen the family memo frame lights up to indicate that there are new messages.The shopping list that has been composedneeds confirmation before it is sent to the supermarket for delivery. There is also a message notifying that the home information system has found new information on the semantic Web about economic holiday cottages with sea sightin Spain. She briefly connects to the playroom to say hello to Charlotte, and her video picture automatically appears on the flat screen that is currently used by Charlotte.

HUMAN ACTIVITYSENSORY

OBSERVATIONS

DATA

PATTERNS

BEHAVIOUR

RECOGNITION AND

ABNORMALY DETECTION

APPROPRIATE RESPONSE

Next, she connects to Peter at the art fair in Paris. He shows her through his contact lens camera some of the sculptures he intends to buy, and she confirms his choice. In the mean time she selects one of the displayed menus that indicate what can be preparedwith the food that is currently available from the pantry and the refrigerator. Next, she switches to the video on demand channel to watch the latest news program. Through the 'followme' she switches over to the flat screenin the bedroom where she is going to have her personalized workout session. Later that evening, after Peter has returned home, they are chatting with a friend in the living room with their personalized ambient lighting switched on. They watch the virtual presenter that informs them about the programs andthe information that have been recorded by the home storage server earlier that day.

Intelligent Kitchen:

Among the various places in a Smart home, the kitchen is the most interesting and has attracted the attention of many researchers. A kitchencan be one of the most dangerous places at home, So Safety, Security, luxury come hand in hand here. Intelligent Spoon aims to introduce computing into traditional culinary utensils. It seeks to provide information, in an integratedmanner, about any food the spoon is in contact with, and to offer suggestions

to improve the food. The spoon is equipped with sensors that measure temperature, acidity, salinity, and viscosity

Heat Sink:

The coloured LEDs powered by a solid-state microcircuit on the tap project coloured light into the stream of water to communicate its temperature to users. Red and blue are commonly usedfor hot and cold. This is presently a commercially available product.

The Kitchen as a Graphical User Interface:

Everyday objects can become computer interfaces by the overlay of digital information. This paper describes scenarios and implementations in which imagery is digitally painted onthe objects and spaces of a kitchen. Five augmented physical interfaces were designed to orient and inform people in the tasks of cleaning, cooking and accessing information: Information Table, Information Annotation of Kitchen, Heat Sink, Spatial Definition, and Social Floor. Together, these interfaces augment the entire room into a single graphical user interface

Enabling nutrition-aware cooking in a smart kitchen. A smart kitchen thatcan enhance the traditional meal preparation and cooking process by raising awareness of the nutrition factsin food ingredients that go into a meal.The goal is to promote healthy cooking. Our smart kitchen is augmented with

sensors to detect cooking activities andprovides digital feedbacks to users about nutritional information on the used food ingredients. It records the cooking of the user and replicates it. So the cooking process can be repeated by another user in a similar way. This is done by capturing the users cooking on video.

Refrigerator:

A sensor knows what has been placed in the unit and updates an electronic list of all contents. The unit uses this information to assist theconsumer by not only offering an inventory of foods available but also byworking with the inventory from the pantry to suggest menus. The sensor alsoknows an item's relative position and will automatically adjust local atmospheric conditions (temperature and humidity) for optimal food preservation.Advanced aero-gel and vacuum panel insulation afford thinner walls creatingmore room for what consumers want to store with greater efficiency. Organic light-emitting diode technology (OLED) evenly distributes lighting and saves space.

Multi-Technology Oven:

Microwave, thermal and convection energies combine to cook food better andfaster. Based on a menu selection, the oven automatically pre-heats. A thermo-scan of the oven shows which areas of food are at proper temperature. Waste

heat is used to heat water for washing dishes.

Dishwasher:

Water for kitchen cleanup is heated through thermo-waste created by the wall oven. Detergent is loaded in bulk once per year, and dispensed via algorithms to minimize the cleaning agents in wastewater. Grey water createdthough dish cleaning is reprocessed for use in other areas of the home and garden.

Sensate floors:

A sensitive floor can be used for the detecting the “absence” of a person when the food is overcooked and the object can be switched off, Or the floorcan detect the presence of a child and the system can take precautionary measures. Though it makes sensitive floor attractive the cost and resolutionalso play a big part in the design.

A Large Area Force Sensor for Smart SkinApplications:

The sensing mechanism is based on the novel contact piezoresistive effect.Furthermore, the sensor’s resolution, size and shape can be easily tailored tothe applications’ requirements. A smart skin embedded in the floor can be used to identify people by analyzing their footstep force profiles. Moreover, a

sensor that covers the whole floor area would be able to locate and track the position of multiple users in a smart home. Such a smart home can automatically adapt its local environment to the user’s preferences such as ambient light, music, temperature etc.

The scanning laser rangefinder which is inexpensive. Though here a “WALL” is mentioned as a surface, similar techniques are applied to floorstoo, The problem being the change in transparency over time. A scanning laserrangefinder at one corner of the displayto determine the polar (r, φ) coordinates of hands in a plane above the projection surface Laser rangefinders are commercially available devices, used for survey, robotic, and military applications, But still considerably expensive.

A Textile Based Capacitive Pressure Sensor:

The system is composed of a distributed passive array of capacitors,as sketched in fig.1, (i.e. an array where no active elements such as transistors are involved), whose capacitance varies according to the pressure exerted over a fabric surface, as well as an electronic system that collects and computes the subsequent capacitance variations. The system produces an image of the pressure field,providing both the information on the area touching the surface of the sensor and on the pressure exerted. The emphasis in this solution is on

detection of small pressures (e.g. lightstroking) being applied over a relatively wide area.

A grid of shielded cable, similar to standard coaxial wire but with a piezoelectric copolymer used for the inner insulation, is placed on the floor(spaced at a 4-inch pitch) The piezoelectric material produces a voltage (in the 1-5 volt range if terminated with a high impedance) when the wire is stepped (proportional to foot pressure) Our current setup uses a grid of 16 ×32 wires at a 4-inch pitch below a 6 ×10 foot trapezoidal segment of carpet

Cost Effective Immersive Room with Pressure sensing Floor:

This proposes the architecture of a pressure sensing floor divided in rigid tiles. The system is based on a network of flexible pad pressure sensors, used under all tile corners, connected to special local data acquisition circuits. Signals captured by the sensor units are transmitted to asystem controller that process, display and store the information received. The proposed architecture was applied in an

interactive room with a 64 tiles floor, providing a network weight measuring system that allows detecting, recording and tracking the movement of objects or people over the sensitive area.

Sensate Floors- Applications:

A system for identifying people based on their footstep force profiles. This floor system may be used to transparently identify users in their everyday living and

1) Sensor floor designs can use large-area force-sensitive resistors that respond to foot pressure. These can be fragile, however, and difficult to transport for mobile installations.2) Optical techniques, for instance by illuminating translucent floorboards with IR from below and inferring range from detected intensity reflecting off the foot. While this can also measure the foot when it is above the floor, it requires calibration for variations in sole reflectance and floor transparency (which can change with time), and does not directly provide pressure signals.

3) Electric fields, either measuring thechange in capacitance between two platessandwiching an insulator that compresseswith pressure, directly measuring the loading of a capacitive electrode by thebody when a foot is nearby, or measuringthe coupling of an external signal sent from the shoe into a receptor electrode on the floor.

Conclusion:

1) The field of Ambient Intelligence canbe best used when researches from different groups come together. At present the interaction between different groups (e.g., distributed networking group and sensor design group) is minimal. The products that aremore generic ( smart homes ) tend to useoff the shelf components, but for the products that are more specific and havea good market ( sensate floors – used for dance step recognition etc) Researchgroups are going for integrated approachby use of conductor printing ( Textile based sensors) , MEMS ( wearable sensors) and many more . So we can relate the use of technology to market and competition. As the field becomes more competitive integrated approaches will become cheaper, and will be used more.

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