Abstract

Home automation has been an active and intense area of research since the times when electricity was made available widely. Home automation comprises a number of sub-areas, among which is home monitoring, and home surveillance. Interest in home monitoring has just begun to emerge as a number of sensors become available, exhibiting ever increasing sophistication and offered capabilities. This paper reports on the development and experimentation of a novel extensible platform for the monitoring of the home environment, which allows complex event processing by collecting measurements from sensor that are deployed in a home environment as a stream of events, and using knowledge engineering techniques for detecting the events of interest to be communicated to the user’s mobile phone, allowing thus a user to monitor its home from remote locations. Experiences with the platform are also presented in the paper.

Keywords: Android phones, building monitoring and surveillance, knowledge engineering, middleware platforms, mobile terminals, rule based systems, sensor networks, specification formalisms, SNDE (Sensor Network Data Engine), Complex Event Processing (CEP)