Section: Application Domains

Pervasive applications in Smart Home

A smart home is a residence equipped with information-and-communication-technology (ICT) devices conceived to collaborate in order to anticipate and respond to the needs of the occupants, working to promote their comfort, convenience, security and entertainment while preserving their natural interaction with the environment.

The idea of using the Ubiquitous Computing paradigm in the smart home domain is not new. However, the state-of-the-art solutions only partially adhere to its principles. Often the adopted approach consists in a heavy deployment of sensor nodes, which continuously send a lot of data to a central elaboration unit, in charge of the difficult task of extrapolating meaningful information using complex techniques. This is a logical approach. Tacoma proposed instead the adoption of a physical approach, in which the information is spread in the environment, carried by the entities themselves, and the elaboration is directly executed by these entities "inside" the physical space. This allows performing meaningful exchanges of data that will thereafter need a less complicate processing compared to the current solutions. The result is a smart home that can, in an easier and better way, integrate the context in its functioning and thus seamlessly deliver more useful and effective user services. Our contribution aims at implementing the physical approach in a domestic environment, showing a solution for improving both comfort and energy savings.