The aim of this work was to implement and compare several activity recognition algorithms which could be used in a smart home environment and would be able to determine the current activity of an observed subject (virtual agent) in the smart home using only data gathered by elementary observations of the environment. Such algorithms are useful in several areas, for example to improve behavior of various virtual agents, making them more aware of actions of the other agents. The algorithms used in this thesis are based on Dynamic Bayesian Networks and have ability to determine whether the observed activity has been completed or just interrupted. An easily extensible 3D interactive simulator of a smart home environment was created to meet the needs of activity recognition and used to gather data for the learning and testing phases of the algorithms. The test subjects were human-controlled virtual agents.

The goal of this master thesis was to evaluate the field of Smart home applications run on mobile platforms such as smart phones. This was at the time a relatively new field that has attracted the attention of Smart phone giants like Apple and Google. This raised the question whether or not the users willingness to embrace the technology. To evaluate the field, a literature study was conducted covering the Smart home technology, and Apple’s and Google’s Smart home solutions. The rendered in a prototype for a Smart home communication application which was run on the Android platform. The prototype was then used in user tests focusing on the usability of the application and the field of Smart home smart phone applications. Even though the usability of the application was regarded fairly low, positive results were obtained regarding the evaluation of the field it self. This points to promising progress of Smart home applications run on smart phones.

Buildings account for approximately 40% of the energy demand and 33% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union. Accordingly, there are several efforts that target energy efficiency in buildings both at the European and Swedish levels. The role of buildings in climate change mitigation, however, is not limited to energy savings. Buildings are expected to become key elements of the future smart energy systems by supplying and using energy in a more flexible way. Reducing the energy demand in buildings effectively and shifting the role of buildings in energy systems from ‘passive’ consumers to ‘active’ prosumers, however, require close interaction and cooperation between the energy and buildings sectors. Based on the data collected from interviews and a web survey, this doctoral thesis investigates the relationship between the energy and buildings sectors in Sweden at the inter-company level, presents key stakeholder views on smart energy features in buildings and investigates the opportunities and barriers for their adoption in Sweden and Hong Kong. The results of this thesis suggest a potential for improving the cooperation between the Swedish energy and buildings sectors, which was identified to be influenced by the following factors: district heating monopolies; energy efficiency efforts in the buildings sector; unsuccessful technology-neutrality of the building regulations; self-generation systems in buildings; and energy use patterns. Shifting the focus from self-gains to mutual gains appears crucial to strengthen the inter-sectoral cooperation, as there are several opportunities for achieving mutually beneficial solutions for the two sectors. This would, however, require significant changes in current practices and business models as well as the introduction of new technologies, which would allow for a more flexible energy supply and use. Accordingly, technologies that target flexible energy use in buildings are considered the most important smart energy features in buildings. The current high costs of technologies, such as home automation and smart electrical appliances, however, create the strongest barrier to adoption. Therefore, the introduction of new business and ownership models and the elimination of the institutional and regulatory barriers are crucial to achieve a wide-scale development of smart energy features in buildings. The results from Hong Kong suggest that institutional and regulatory barriers can particularly create strong hinders to the adoption of technologies. It is possible to achieve more sustainable energy systems, where buildings are active elements of networks that supply and use energy in a more flexible and ‘smarter’ way. Cooperation between the energy and buildings sectors can play a key role in the adoption of smart energy features in buildings and pave the way for the smart built environment of the future.

With the development of computer and information technology, information and network will be the inevitable trend of smart home which aims to offer a comfortable, efficient, and convenient home. In this thesis, the background, developments and limitations of smart home systems will be described. Wired and wireless technologies applied on the smart home network will be analyzed and a comparison of them will be made. Finally, the ZigBee technology is selected to design the wireless communication network. For the system design, the thesis describes an idea where cluster topology is chosen to design the smart home system and demonstrates the process of networking as well. Based on the Labview platform, a smart home system will be simulated to achieve the functions included in data acquisition, analysis, display and storage. More specially, I will focus on temperature monitoring and control of heating and cooling systems. Finally, an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the smart home system is given.

The thesis, Intelligent Home Automation Security System Based on Novel Logical Sensing and Behavior Prediction, was designed to enhance authentication, authorization and security in smart home devices and services. The work proposes a three prong defensive strategy each of which are analyzed and evaluated separately to drastically improve security. The Device Fingerprinting techniques proposed, not only improves the existing approaches but also identifies the physical device accessing the home cybernetic and mechatronic systems using device specific and browser specific parameters. The Logical Sensing process analyses home inhabitant actions from a logical stand point and develops sophisticated and novel sensing techniques to identify intrusion attempts to a home’s physical and cyber space. Novel Behavior prediction methodology utilizes Bayesian networks to learn normal user behavior which is later compared to distinguish and identify suspicious user behaviors in the home in a timely manner. The logical sensing, behavior prediction and device fingerprinting techniques proposed were successfully tested, evaluated and verified in an actual home cyber physical system. The algorithms and techniques proposed in the thesis can be easily modified and adapted into many practical applications in Industrial Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 and cyber-physical systems. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / PhD / Unrestricted

The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to a situation where individual manufacturers develop their own communication protocols and frameworks that are often incompatible with other systems. Part of this is due to the use of incompatible communication hardware, and part is due to the entrenched proprietary systems. This has created a heterogeneous communication landscape, where it is difficult for devices to coordinate their efforts. To remedy this, a number of IoT Frameworks have been proposed to provide a common interface between IoT devices. There are many approaches to common frameworks, each with their strengths and weaknesses, but there is no clear winner among them. This thesis presents a virtual network testbed for implementing smart home IoT Frameworks. It consists of a simulated home network made up of multiple Virtual Machines (VM), simulated smart home devices and an implementation of the OpenHAB framework to integrate the devices. Simulated devices are designed to be network- accurate representations of actual devices, a LIFX smart lightbulb was developed and an existing Nest thermostat simulation was integrated. The demonstrated setup serves as a proof of concept for the idea of a home network testbed. Such a testbed could allow for the development of new IoT frameworks or the comparison of existing ones, and it could also serve as an education aid to illustrate how smart home IoT devices communicate with one another. / Master of Science

<p>  </p> <p>The rise of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies into the substantial commercial market that it is today comes with several challenges. Not only do these systems face the traditional challenges of security and reliability faced by traditional information technology (IT) products, but they also face the challenge of loss of privacy. The concern of user data privacy is most prevalent when these technologies come into the home environment. In this dissertation quasi-experimental research is conducted on the ability of users to protect private data in a heterogeneous smart home network. For this work the experiments are conducted and verified on eight different smart home devices using network traffic analysis and discourse analysis to identify privacy concerns. The results of the research show that data privacy within the confines of the user’s home often cannot be ensured while maintaining smart home device functionality. This dissertation discusses how those results can inform users and manufacturers alike in the use and development of future smart home technologies to better protect privacy concerns.</p>

The development of an Indoor Positioning System that requires a non-invasive setup and installation process is outlined in this dissertation. The Hardware, Mechanical and Software components are described in complete detail. The system operates using a hybrid of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) signal strength analysis and proximity sensor data collection to determine the location of a known Bluetooth compatible device. Additionally, a dynamic remote calibration protocol was developed to ensure a safe and smooth setup and integration process in any location the system is implemented. The system uses custom designed beacon modules that connect directly to outlets in designated rooms. These beacons relay sensor and BLE data to a Hub module that collects and stores all this data locally and on a cloud server. These features ensured that the IPS is a completely remote device that can be setup independently by the user. To our knowledge, this is the only Indoor Positioning System that does not require prior knowledge of the location of integration and the need for an in-person setup and calibration process. Additionally, despite the lack of an extensive setup and calibration process the system still operates at an accurate room detection percentage of 98%. To further prove its ease of use the system has been implemented in a clinical study where several older adults (65+) have integrated this system within their homes. This system has been designed to act as the foundation for larger scale healthcare monitoring applications. / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy / Indoor positioning technology acts as the foundation for several healthcare monitoring networks. An accurate and easy to use indoor positioning system will entail how effective the overall healthcare monitoring platform is. Additionally, indoor positioning itself can be accomplished in several different ways. Some of these approaches include the use of physical sensors to detect presence, signal strength approximations via some sort of communication protocol or even the use of secure entry via RFID identification tags. Currently, most of the systems that use one of these approaches require extensive setup and calibration processes and extensive knowledge of the tracking locations. However, this is not always practical especially when the system is integrated in a large-scale environment like a retirement home. A system with an easy- to-use setup and installation platform is needed to complete these high impact healthcare monitoring projects.

As a result of developments, domestic usage of smart appliances by homeowners is increasing drastically. Clustering these appliances together and making them function as an efficient system defines a new place to live or new way of living called a “smart home”. While a smart home provides comfort to homeowners, realizing a smart home involves many technical and business oriented hurdles to be crossed. The primary goal of this thesis work is to design and evaluate the design of a residential gateway. This gateway should be designed as a standardized, secure, open source, hardware independent, and interoperable Residential Gateway. A service-oriented architecture is proposed using the OSGi framework to design the residential gateway and its individual components. These components include an access control component for homeowner authorization, a resource management component for managing connected devices, an automation component to realize an automation service, and finally a context component to provide context aware services to the homeowner. The final design proposed tries to solve the issues faced by some automation systems that are available in market. The evaluation of the design includes whether the design satisfies the basic requirements for a home gateway. This is followed by a comparison with existing systems with an emphasis on the improved features. The components proposed in the design could be used to construct a residential gateway that supports multiple services and multiple users. The proposed design will be taken into consideration during the design of Acreo’s home automation system. / Som en följd av utvecklingen inom vetenskap och teknik så har användningen av smarta lösningar i hushållen ökat drastiskt. Att samla dessa apparater och få dem att fungera tillsammans som ett effektivt system, skapar ett nytt hem och ett nytt sätt att leva: ett smart hem. Å ena sidan så ger smartare lösningar ett bekvämare boende, men å andra sidan innebär det också många tekniska och affärsinriktade hinder att ta sig över. Det primära målet med denna avhandling är att utforma en bostadsgateway som är att utforma en standardiserad, säker, open source, maskinvaruoberoende, interoperabel Residential Gateway. En serviceorienterad arkitektur föreslås med hjälp av OSGi-ramverket för utformning av bostadsgateway-komponenter. Komponenterna innefattar behörighetskontroll för husägare för tillgångskontroll, resurshanteringskomponenter för hantering av anslutna enheter, automationskomponent för att inkludera automationstjänst och slutligen kontextkomponent för att tillhandahålla kontextbevakad tjänster till husägaren. Den slutliga designen som föreslås försöker lösa de problem som vissa automationssystem som finns på marknaden står inför. Utvärderingen av konstruktionen med grundläggande krav för att bygga hemgateways och med befintliga system ger information om de improviserade funktionerna. De komponenter som föreslås i konstruktionen kan användas för att bygga en bostadsgateway som stöder flera tjänster och flera användare. Den föreslagna konstruktionen kommer att beaktas vid utformningen av Acreos hemautomatiseringssystem.

The future smart home will be enhanced and driven by the recent advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), which advocates the integration of computational devices within an Internet architecture on a global scale [1, 2]. In the IoT paradigm, the smart home will be developed by interconnecting a plethora of smart objects both inside and outside the home environment [3-5]. The recent take-up of these connected devices within home environments is slowly and surely transforming traditional home living environments. Such connected and integrated home environments lead to the concept of the smart home, which has attracted significant research efforts to enhance the functionality of home environments with a wide range of novel services. The wide availability of services and devices within contemporary smart home environments make their management a challenging and rewarding task. The trend whereby the development of smart home services is decoupled from that of smart home devices increases the complexity of this task. As such, it is desirable that smart home services are developed and deployed independently, rather than pre-bundled with specific devices, although it must be recognised that this is not always practical. Moreover, systems need to facilitate the deployment process and cope with any changes in the target environment after deployment. Maintaining complex smart home systems throughout their lifecycle entails considerable resources and effort. These challenges have stimulated the need for dynamic auto-configurable services amongst such distributed systems. Although significant research has been directed towards achieving auto-configuration, none of the existing solutions is sufficient to achieve auto-configuration within smart home environments. All such solutions are considered incomplete, as they lack the ability to meet all smart home requirements efficiently. These requirements include the ability to adapt flexibly to new and dynamic home environments without direct user intervention. Fulfilling these requirements would enhance the performance of smart home systems and help to address cost-effectiveness, considering the financial implications of the manual configuration of smart home environments. Current configuration approaches fail to meet one or more of the requirements of smart homes. If one of these approaches meets the flexibility criterion, the configuration is either not executed online without affecting the system or requires direct user intervention. In other words, there is no adequate solution to allow smart home systems to adapt dynamically to changing circumstances, hence to enable the correct interconnections among its components without direct user intervention and the interruption of the whole system. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an efficient, adaptive, agile and flexible system that adapts dynamically to each new requirement of the smart home environment. This research aims to devise methods to automate the activities associated with customised service delivery for dynamic home environments by exploiting recent advances in the field of ubiquitous robotics and Semantic Web technologies. It introduces a novel approach called the Knowledge-based Auto-configuration Software Robot (Sobot) for Smart Home Environments, which utilises the Sobot to achieve auto-configuration of the system. The research work was conducted under the Distributed Integrated Care Services and Systems (iCARE) project, which was designed to accomplish and deliver integrated distributed ecosystems with a homecare focus. The auto-configuration Sobot which is the focus of this thesis is a key component of the iCARE project. It will become one of the key enabling technologies for generic smart home environments. It has a profound impact on designing and implementing a high quality system. Its main role is to generate a feasible configuration that meets the given requirements using the knowledgebase of the smart home environment as a core component. The knowledgebase plays a pivotal role in helping the Sobot to automatically select the most appropriate resources in a given context-aware system via semantic searching and matching. Ontology as a technique of knowledgebase representation generally helps to design and develop a specific domain. It is also a key technology for the Semantic Web, which enables a common understanding amongst software agents and people, clarifies the domain assumptions and facilitates the reuse and analysis of its knowledge. The main advantages of the Sobot over traditional applications is its awareness of the changing digital and physical environments and its ability to interpret these changes, extract the relevant contextual data and merge any new information or knowledge. The Sobot is capable of creating new or alternative feasible configurations to meet the system's goal by utilising inferred facts based on the smart home ontological model, so that the system can adapt to the changed environment. Furthermore, the Sobot has the capability to execute the generated reconfiguration plan without interrupting the running of the system. A proof-of-concept testbed has been designed and implemented. The case studies carried out have shown the potential of the proposed approach to achieve flexible and reliable auto-configuration of the smart home system, with promising directions for future research.