The Gator Tech Smart House: a programmable pervasive space

TLDR

Pervasive computing has been prototyped in academia and industry, yet early systems often cannot evolve with new technologies, prompting the Gator Tech Smart House as a five‑year culmination of research in the field. The project aims to create programmable pervasive spaces that serve as both runtime environments and software libraries, enabling assistive homes that sense themselves and residents and map physical interactions to remote monitoring and intervention services. The system employs generic middleware with service discovery and gateway protocols that automatically integrate components, maintaining a service definition for each sensor and actuator while providing a runtime environment and software library for programmable pervasive spaces.

Abstract

Research groups in both academia and industry have developed prototype systems to demonstrate the benefits of pervasive computing in various application domains. Unfortunately, many first-generation pervasive computing systems lack the ability to evolve as new technologies emerge or as an application domain matures. To address this limitation, the University of Florida's Mobile and Pervasive Computing Laboratory is developing programmable pervasive spaces in which a smart space exists as both a runtime environment and a software library. Service discovery and gateway protocols automatically integrate system components using generic middleware that maintains a service definition for each sensor and actuator in the space. The Gator Tech Smart House in Gainesville, Florida, is the culmination of more than five years of research in pervasive and mobile computing. The project's goal is to create assistive environments such as homes that can sense themselves and their residents and enact mappings between the physical world and remote monitoring and intervention services.