Wireless sensor networking of everyday objects in a smart home environment

Abstract

Within a smart home environment the information processing is supposed to be thoroughly integrated into everyday objects. This introduces the need to keep track of the everyday objects and their state changes produced based on the userpsilas interaction with them. Such information is useful in recognizing the userpsilas activities, situations, etc. In this paper we present a ZigBee communication protocol based wireless sensor networking of 42 everyday objects (embedded with 81 simple state change sensors of 8 sensor types) in a living laboratory smart home environment. The system was evaluated in a realistic setup with background noise. The sensing module has shown promising results with an overall system precision of 91.2% and a recall of 98.8% in keeping track of the state changes to everyday objects. The signal strength measure above the acceptable limit of >10 dB to obtain reliable data communication was found to be 97.5% checked at 8 different locations in a home environment. Finally the transmission-reception range was evaluated to be 33 m with a single wall obstruction and 19 m with multiple wall obstruction in an indoor environment.