Cross-Domain Integration of home automation, entertainment, and e-Health using Wireless Sensor Network

Recent advances in wireless sensor and actuator network (WSAN) and other emerging technologies are promoting a paradigm shift in the way that traditional domains like home automation, home based entertainment, or e-Health are understood. However, available technologies present different innate characteristics and are hard to integrate. This paper presents our WSAN-based smart home project, mySmart, to demonstrate the innovative integration mechanism developed that not only integrates researchand commercialoriented WSN platforms at the application layer, but also provides a unified application development environment for building WSAN based monitoring and control systems. mySmart integrates cross-domain home applications such as home automation, entertainment, and eHealth and addresses one of the major challenges in the home automation system design: minimizing the power consumption without compromising the customers comfort level. It combines hybrid-node networking with Web access in three-layer architecture. The system integrates TinyOS-based mica motes deployed in mesh network and National Instrument (NI) LabVIEW-based WSN nodes using star topology to monitor the home environment and the health status of the nodes themselves. The environment data includes temperature, humidity, light intensity, sound, motion, as well as the physiological signals such as body temperature and heart beats from a person (e-Health). The health status information of mySmart includes networking reliability (i.e., link quality and packet delivery ratio) and the power consumption of the WSN node that is battery powered. All the monitoring data are wirelessly collected and visualized in an application developed in LabVIEW, which makes control decisions based on the data collected and the control strategy defined by the user. The control commands are then disseminated wirelessly to the specific actuators (fans, LED light, speaker, etc.). The mySmart Architecture provides the flexibility for future expansion by separating the sensing, networking, and controlling and visualization. It can be easily adapted to support various courses in the science, engineering, and technology program from freshman to senior level. The demonstration of the project to our junior level instrumentation and measurement class is very successful. Students get to see how what they are learning can be used in real world project that is highly relevant to their own life.