Ubiquitous Computing in Smart Living and Appliance Control

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The smart TV works collaboratively with other portable devices including Android systems which allow for text insertion through auto-completion and video calling. This form of case scenario is a magnificent one as it would enhance the health of the elderly from different perspectives which focus on what they eat and drink, the drug intake and other external activities that are linked up with efficient health maintenance from a remote viewing.

Energy conservation scenario

The second case scenario applicable to smart homes is the one that focuses on the use of energy conservation techniques, especially in most U.S. homes. In this case, the objective is to lower energy consumption without affecting the comfort of the inhabitants within the smart home. An algorithm that mines consumer data is developed and applies machine learning to suggest actions for the inhabitants to reduce the energy consumption of their homes. The system looks for frequent periodic patterns and during the process, data is provided by the digitalSTROM home automation system. The patterns are then changed into rules of affiliations, prioritized, and comparisons made with the current behavior of the residents. If the system detects possibilities of saving energy without decreasing the comfort level, it sends a recommendation to the inhabitants.

The system has been implemented and deployed to a set of smart homes with the test participants being able to rate the impact of the recommendation on their comfort. The system has a useful recommendation of about 10% and sends an average of 0.44 recommendations per day per home.

Requirement Analysis

Requirements form a significant part of the process development for a new system. The selections made and used later in the architectural design is commonly based on the needs. Requirements can be categorized as functional or nonfunctional. The functional requirements specify what a product will do while the nonfunctional requirements are the properties that the product must have which make it glamorous, usable and reliable as described by Dabbagh & Lee (2014).

The followings are the functional and non-functional requirements of the smart home system.

Functional requirements

- Should be highly event driven in a way that handles the event with defined and undefined order.

- Should be able to bring information together from various domains such as health care and security and make the application of such scenarios efficient in terms of being domain specific and cross domain application.

- Support hard time to allow for the execution of the functions within a given period. Also, it must be soft real-time features which will minimize system acceptance failures and suffer.

- Have properties that are aimed at minimizing energy consumption, for example, heating devices that use room temperature.

- The system must be able to perform actions in a synchronizing manner and show clearly which events come first, for example, switching lights and which ones come last.

- Must integrate well with the principles of location awareness and locate people indoors to allow for an emergency in case of an issue.

- Interact well with the different services that are interconnecting various services and device, for example, DPWS, REST, and non-IP based to develop the smart home applications.

- The system should use new functionalities which are unforeseen during the design meaning that device discovery should be included within the system.

- Should involve mapping data representations and data formats which allow dealing with concepts. This means that the system should interact with the devices in the best way possible to allow for efficient data transmission.

- Traceability between the system and the client for statistics and liability issues.

- All the applications integrated should work in a coherent manner and in a way that does not contradict one another.

Nonfunctional requirements

- Simple to use from a perspective of learning.

- Modeling states of the complete environment and transition between states is closely related to the state based devices in the home.

- Safe to apply with minimum harm to the environment and the user.

- Maintain the information confidentially of the clients to improve trustworthy of the application (Hongyan, 2015)

Environmental requirements

- Remote control of lighting and heating and air conditioning. Every usage and cost in terms of house automation.

- Enhance the welfare of the humans using it through remote diagnosis involving trainer and general health monitoring.

- Communications should be enhanced through video phone, home calendar and reminders that are situated inside and outside the house.

Characteristics of the system

The features of smart living draw its reasoning from the same features of ubiquitous computing as the knowledge underlying the designing of the architecture is based on ubiquitous computing (Stefanov, Bien & Bang, 2004). The following points describe some features of this system:

- Appliances work in the same physical entity with people. For instance, bulb lighting, in the same way, humans could stretch their hands to light the switch on.

- Have sensors that can be used in many other areas but this case we can talk about bulbs lighting as they are approached.

- Technology is integrated into the system appliances of the house to help make life easier in the pursuit of enhancing smart living.

- Use of smart applications such as smart heaters for ensuring energy conservation in what is referred to as smart electricity.

- Integrates well with the environment in what is considered to be a ray of environmental protection to enhance sustainability.

Survey of existing solutions

The two major problems that ubicomp smart living will try to address in this case are based on the two use cases discussed above namely