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Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry
Bilateral Contracts with Industry
Energy saving mechanisms in smart homes using ambient computing principles
This project is funded by EDF group, leading energy producer in Europe. It started in June 2010 and ended in October 2013. Its goal is to study the use of ambient computing principles for the management of electricity consumption in residential habitat. It focusses on two main objectives: (1) to define scenarios based on home people activities, and (2) to propose an implementation of these scenarios using ambient computing mechanisms studied in the Aces project.
Most existing smart home solutions were designed with a technology-driven approach. That is, the designers explored which services, functionalities, actions and controls could be performed exploiting available technologies. This led to solutions for human activity recognition relying on wearable sensors, microphones or video cameras. Those technologies may be difficult to deploy and get accepted in real-world households, because of convenience and privacy concerns. Many people have concerns on carrying equipments or feeling observed or recorded while living their private life. This could seriously impact the acceptability of the smart home system or reduce its diffusion in real households. To avoid such kind of issues, we designed our system with an acceptability-driven approach. That is, we selected technologies that respond to the constraints of a real-world deployment of the future smart home system, namely, convenience and privacy concerns. We decided to take a very conservative approach, choosing technologies that are as unobtrusive as possible, in order to explore the frontiers of what can be done in a smart home with a very limited instrumentation. Following the same considerations, the adopted technologies and techniques had to guarantee a fast and easy configuration, ultimately allowing a plug-and-play deployment. All these aspects have been studied and experimented using a hardware/software platform maintained by Sylvain Roche. This platform integrated results of two PhDs defended in 2013 (Michele Dominici and Bastien Pietropaoli), and has been used for a demonstration in June 2013 at EDF. A part of software developments is now published under apache licence (see 5.1.1 ) and used by the team.
The new results in 2013 are presented in section 6.2 .