Modern science and technology is all about making our lives more comfortable. As the study of various technologies is progressing, the definition of comfort in our lifestyle is evolving. Tasks that ...involved so much complexities and hard work a few years ago, can now be done by just pushing a button. But by being possessed with thoughts of our own comfort, we often forget the people who need it the most; the physically challenged people. They face so many limitations in everyday life that what may seem luxury to us, is ironically necessity to them. To provide a satisfactory resolution to this, we have built "Smart Home Appliance Control System for Physically Disabled People Using Kinect & X10". Our system's goal is to make their lives easy and comfortable by providing them with a self-dependable environment. To validate the system's acceptability we developed a prototype in our laboratory environment and performed real user study.
This paper presents a case study of residential consumer from the urban area and suggests methods to make anenergy self-reliant house for the reduction in electricity bill. Unlike developed ...countries, India has to explore the use of renewable sources and other means to reduce the energy cost due to non-availability of real time pricing for LT consumers. Depending on the tariff offered by different utilities and the degree of necessity of various household appliances, a comparative study of energy cost is carried out. For the same sample residential flat, a solar PV plant is proposed and saving in energy cost with solar aid is discussed. Finally, a cost objective function is formulated and optimized using linear programming to justify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
The recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) from video can prove particularly useful in assisted living and smart home environments, as behavioral and lifestyle profiles can be constructed ...through the recognition of ADLs over time. Often, existing methods for recognition of ADLs have a very high computational cost, which makes them unsuitable for real time or near real time applications. In this work we present a novel method for recognizing ADLs with accuracy comparable to the state of the art, at a lowered computational cost. Comprehensive testing of the best existing descriptors, encoding methods and BoW/SVM based classification methods takes place to determine the optimal recognition solution. A statistical method for determining the temporal duration of extracted trajectories is also introduced, to streamline the recognition process and make it less ad-hoc. Experiments take place with benchmark ADL datasets and a newly introduced set of ADL recordings of elderly people with dementia as well as healthy individuals. Our algorithm leads to accurate recognition rates, comparable or better than the State of the Art, at a lower computational cost.
The system designed in this paper is a multichannel wireless remote switch control system, which uses the single chip microcomputer(SCM) AT89S52 as the core of control and uses the wireless encoding ...and decoding chip PT2262/2272 as the core of wireless communication. Furthermore, this system includes an expanding design of an infrared human body induction circuit in order to improve the intelligent control to household furnish. System tests show that: The system reliably realizes the wireless remote intelligent control to a variety of household electrical appliances and the display of the status of different household electrical appliances.
Smart environment applications have gained a lot of attention and acceptance from the community. For this reason, many design and evaluation efforts target these applications. However, these ...applications rely on a software architecture that driven by a well-designed middleware. In this paper we propose design and evaluation requirements for smart environment software architectures and demonstrate how these requirements can be met with a simple, lightweight publish-subscribe design paradigm. We describe our CLM middleware that follows these requirements and illustrate its extensive use as part of the CASAS smart home system.
During the recent years, we can observe how mobile devices entered in the lives of people, becoming their main personal assistants and helping in various daily tasks. However not just mobile devices ...have evolved. And others electronic devices we use every day also experienced changes that have become smarter as the example of home devices. All these devices interconnected in the same environment or the same network, making use of services and exchange information with other devices, characterize a smart environment. Smart homes are special class of such environments and, increasingly, has become a scene with a variety of heterogeneous devices. However, due to the rapid progress of technology and the rise of a large number of heterogeneous devices, a variety of independent communication protocols were created, establishing a complex scenario to ensure interoperability between them. In this context, the main objective of this paper is to analyze the state of the art with an emphasis on the interoperability of current Mobile Devices with other digital devices present in a Smart home. Thus, it will be defined which protocols are currently most commonly used for this purpose, what are the current ongoing projects, what are the limitations of the solutions found in the research and, finally, it will be proposed an alternative solution for interoperability between the devices at a Smart home.
Pervasive healthcare is emerging as a possible solution for the healthcare needs of an increasingly elderly population in the developed world. It is capable of providing a technology-driven approach ...to alleviate the healthcare needs by allowing healthcare to move from hospital-centered care to self-care, mobile care, and at-home care. When pervasive computing is used to provide technology-driven assistive healthcare, there is a need for the system to be as intelligent and sophisticated as possible, while also being as transparent and accountable as possible for both subject and caregivers. The CARA (Context Aware Real-time Assistant) healthcare system implements a sophisticated hybrid reasoning framework that incorporates both rule-based and case-based reasoning mechanisms. This provides a novel solution that combines context awareness, general domain knowledge, and automated intelligence for pervasive healthcare. The use of a sophisticated reasoning engine in healthcare demands accountability of the system. To improve the accountability of the reasoning system, we explored the use of case provenance to provide better understanding of the reasoning outcome to the user, and increase transparency. We developed a semantic-based mechanism to check the correctness and coherence of the fuzzy rules by detecting possible conflicts, this aims to eliminate inconsistency.
Optimizing the use of copper especially in the distribution system not only reduces the cost but more importantly lowers the copper losses. This paper presents a unique innovative technique which ...reduces copper volume while enabling home automation. This model of smart home is designed to provide a base for Smart Grid's functions like demand side management, AMR, load shedding etc. The optimization problem is solved with a Big Bang-Big Crunch algorithm inspired from Big Bang Theory and the results obtained are compared with adapted Genetic algorithm to demonstrate the efficiency of BBBC.
Provider: - Institution: - Data provided by Europeana Collections- Zugl.: Karlsruhe, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), Diss., 2013- All metadata published by Europeana are available free of ...restriction under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. However, Europeana requests that you actively acknowledge and give attribution to all metadata sources including Europeana
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