2009 Third International Conference on Next Generation Mobile Applications, Services and Technologies

SmartEye - Integrated solution to home automation, security and monitoring through mobile phones
K. Atukorala #1 , D. Wijekoon 2 , M. Tharugasini #3 , I. Perera #4 , C. Silva #5
#

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Moratuwa. Sri Lanka.

1

paba@uom.lk

Media Team, University of Oulu. Oulu, Finland

2

dinesh@ee.oulu.fi

Abstract Automation is the process of having a machine or machines to accomplish tasks hitherto performed wholly or partly by humans. Home automation concerns automating the domestic tasks. There are number of applications addressing home automation and monitoring involving infrared/Bluetooth or Ethernet over Power techniques in remote controls. But there is no such publication on providing facility to control and monitor unlimited number of equipments at home via a mobile device at a very low cost using General Packet Radio Services (GPRS) networks. This paper presents a recent research and development effort in construing a real-time home automation and monitoring system named SmartEye which uses cellular networks, Internet based server, networked hardware equipments and GPRS networks. SmartEye accomplishes two tasks; they are home automation and monitoring through mobile phone. Under automation it addresses turning on/off household electrical appliances, such as electric bulbs, door locks etc. SmartEye uses an alerting mechanism together with security cameras to safeguard homes. And also it provides an interface to monitor and control the home through mobile devices. This is a system which integrates the home with the World Wide Web and mobile devices. This paper also discusses the architecture of the system which makes it an easily expandable, user-friendly, affordable and reliable real-time monitoring and remote controlling solution.

I. I NTRODUCTION The life cycle of modern man is evolved in such a manner that without multitasking he will lag behind the rest of the society by light ages. The most recent innovations show that we can be online while watching TV, reading emails while driving the car, taking calls while ascending Mount Everest, watching television while shaving in front of the mirror or accessing email while traveling [1]. With the advancement of technology we are provided with solutions that save our time while facilitating most of our common daily problems. Automating the daily chorus can save most of our time. If there exists a system which can save our time while taking care of our other responsibilities such as securing our belongings and let us monitor them even when we are far away, then it will further improve the quality of our lives. This is the main concern of SmartEye. The home is an eternal, heterogeneous, distributed computing environment which must be secured and reliable [2]. Hence a house can become a home only if it becomes secure.
978-0-7695-3786-3/09 $26.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/NGMAST.2009.46 64

SmartEye also provides the ability to control and monitor the household appliances through the mobile device. Mobile device has become one of the most common consumer devices today; therefore it is used to provide the user with the main interface to interact [3]. At the same time the user is sent alerts whenever there is a security breach. These are the basic features of SmartEye. A unique model is proposed in providing these features. The functionality of SmartEye can be distributed among four major sub systems. They are Central Server Home sub-system Web conguration sub-system Mobile sub-system The central server provides services to the other three sub systems. Home sub-system has two basic functions; it provides a user friendly interface for conguration of household equipments to the system and relays information between the central server and household equipments. User has the freedom to add/remove unlimited number of equipments to the system with ease. A Local Area Network (LAN) is setup at home and this is used between the home sub-system and the equipments. The web conguration system is used to draw the home plan and place the equipments in their respective positions. The home plan drawn through web conguration tool is displayed in the mobile device. The mobile sub-system provides the main interface to control and monitor the home through a mobile device. All these sub-systems combined together to form a heterogeneous system. Each of these subsystems is further discussed in the latter sections of this document. Finally it will be shown that the SmartEye developed by the integration of all these subsystems is unique, cost effective and easy to use. II. BACKGROUND The main objective of this paper is to propose a solution to home automation and security. Automation can be dened as the replacement of manual operations by computerized methods. Note that the concept of home automation is not new. The early prototypes of commercial products were rst being developed at the end of the 1970s, over 38 years ago. Number of attempts has been made to develop, implement and maintain

standardization for control system of home automation [4]. X10, LonTalk, CEBus and LnCP (Living Network Control Protocol) are some of the examples of such standards [5]. But the idea of extending the ways in which current systems are implemented and utilizing latest technologies to provide better results generated interest towards this project. Nevertheless the future of intelligent homes is still open [6]. The identication of the improvable areas of the existing systems is one of the most important tasks. To strengthen this study we referred substantial amount of literature on home automation and monitoring. Following is an analysis of existing systems. There is no such publication on a system which provides unlimited expandability on the number of items to be controlled/ monitored. The main reason for this is the usage of the PC-parallel port [4] to connect hardware equipments to the system. But here we make use of the Ethernet port in communicating with the household equipment which forms a LAN. Hence the Ethernet port is used in sending signals to the hardware equipments and hardware equipments are identied using IP addresses. As a result of this unlimited number of equipment can be connected to the system. Most of the existing systems provide home monitoring through web interfaces [7]. Very few systems provide a mobile interface for home controlling. None of the existing systems provide an image of the home plan with equipments in the mobile device [8], [9]. This system makes use of mobile technologies such as GPRS. GPRS is a popular technology with many advanced features. GPRS was not widely in use when most of the present systems were developed. Hence most of the existing systems work through simple short messages (SMS) [9]. The following features of GPRS make it more effective [10]. Always on- Data can be sent with no delay. Parallelism- Can even make a phone call while sending data. This feature is very important in this system. When using mobile device for monitoring homes, it should not abandon the normal operations of the mobile device users (i.e., voice calls). High band width- GPRS supports higher data rates. Hence, it is possible to send data fast [11]. Low cost- In GPRS the cost is calculated based on the amount of data transformed during a session not on the duration of the session. Most of the available systems are not affordable for an average income earner. Therefore this solution is very cost effective with respect to most of the available systems [12], [13]. However our proposed system can be congured to support different levels of security. Therefore the user has the exibility to select a security package which suits the user requirements the most. Even the installation cost of the system is low. III. P ROBLEM Home automation and security are common problems for decades and different systems are devised to solve them.

Most of the existing solutions lack certain important features. We focus on addressing most of the issues associated with existing solutions in home automation and security. Some of the potential problems which are worth of addressing are listed below. 1) None of the existing systems provide the facility to expand the number of equipments controlled / monitored unlimitedly. 2) Most of the existing systems cannot be integrated with an already built home without re-wiring. This is one of the major issues with regards to usability and exibility of many systems. But this problem is addressed by SmartEye by providing a exible solution which lets the user add/remove any item to/from the system with ease. 3) Since most of the existing systems use SMS to communicate between the server and the mobile device the cost of these systems can be high. 4) Security level requirements are different for different users. Therefore we provide a solution which can alter the level of security. 5) Most of the existing systems are not affordable for most of the users. And some of the systems provide solutions which are not much useful for domestic applications [9]. This system can easily be customized to address different security requirements and automation requirements according to the level of criticality of security and automation. 6) Many of the solutions do not provide a user-friendly mobile interface to monitor the home and control the equipment [14], [15], [16]. 7) None of the existing solutions provide an image of the plan of the home and the status of each equipment as it appears in home in the mobile device [17].This can be a problem since the user does not have a clear idea of what is being controlled. Some systems show the list of equipments congured at home in the mobile device [4]. The user has to select the equipment from a drop down list in the mobile device. This type of interfaces are not very user friendly since the user has to remember what equipment is represented by the name in the drop down menu of the mobile device [9]. Some of the current systems provide a view of the home through a web application. But this can be troublesome since the user has to login to web every time the user wants to view the status of the home. IV. M ETHODOLOGY This system is implemented as four different sub-modules as mentioned above in Section I. The central server is focused on providing services to the other three modules. Central server acts as the controlling unit and the data repository of the system. It provides three interfaces to the three sub modules; mobile sub-system, web conguration sub-system and home sub-system.

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Fig. 1.

Abstract view of the overall system

The home sub-system provides two functions as in Section I; it provides an interface to congure household electric equipments to the system and relays messages between the server and the hardware equipments. Four different types of equipments can be congured to the Home sub-system. They are Electrical equipments - Two state switchers Camera - Capture images Sensor - Send alerts Door- Lock and unlock An electronic circuit module named RabbitCore Module is used to connect the household electric equipments to the home system. A PC (i.e., Personal Computer) is used to run the home system. We propose to use an ADSL (i.e., Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) connection to connect the Home System to the Central Server. The RabbitCore Module is connected to a router and the router is connected to the home PC as shows in the Figure 2. Each RabbitCore Module has the TCP

Fig. 2.

Abstract view of the Home Subsystem

stack implemented. During conguration the user can assign

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an IP address to this RabbitCore Module. This IP address will refer to the household equipment connected to this RabbitCore Module. Therefore each one of the household equipment is networked in this manner and an IP address is used to identify each one of them. This creates a LAN at home. The RabbitCore Module makes a socket connection with the home system after it is been congured to the home system. The RabbitCore Module contains a set of I/O (i.e., Input/Output) ports. We design an electronic circuit to control the household equipment using the output of the RabbitCore Module. RabbitCore Module is programmed using Dynamic C (i.e., A programming Language). According to this program it can analyze the data streamed by the home system through the socket connection and it gives an electric signal as the out put. This electric out put is sent to the electronic circuit. For instance, if the Rabbit Core Module outputs a 0.5V electric signal, then the electronic circuit will turn on and supply current to the household equipment. Similarly if the home system needs to turn household equipment off then it sends a message to the Rabbit Core module asking it to turn it off. Then the Rabbit Core Module will analyze this message and change its output from 0.5V to 0 V. The electronic circuit will turn off and the current supply to the household equipment will stop as a result of that. The web conguration tool is used to draw the home plan as mentioned in Section I. After conguring the household equipments to the home system the database in the central server will get updated. When this user logs in to the web conguration tool the user can see these equipments. Using this tool the user can draw the home plan and place these equipments in their respective positions. When the user submits this home plan, all the coordinates related to the position of the lines and the positions of the equipments of this home plan is sent to the central server. All these data is stored in the central database. The mobile system is used as the main interface to control and monitor the home as mentioned in Section I. Once the user logs in to the mobile system through a mobile device, the user can view the home plan. Whenever the user wants to control equipment at home, rst the user has to send a request to the central server. Central server stores this information in the database. The home system periodically polls (i.e., send requests to the server) asking for updates. The rate at which the home system polls the server is called the home poll rate. Home poll rate is a system parameter which can be set to any value based on the user requirement. When the home polls, the server sends all the updates stored in the database related to this home to the home system. This data sent by the server contains the IP address of the household equipment and the status change (i.e., whether to turn off or on the equipment). The home system analyses this request and sends it to the router through which the Rabbit Core Module receives this data as mentioned above. Similarly if a person at home switches on/off equipment, the home system sends these updates to the central server.

Central server stores this information in the database. Mobile system also polls the server periodically at a predetermined poll rate. This poll rate is also a system parameter which can be altered according to users requirement. When the mobile system polls it gets all the updates about the changes at home. Mobile system generates alerts and informs the mobile device user about these changes at home. At the same time the Mobile system uses a color scheme to represent the status of equipment in the home plan displayed in the mobile device. For instance, if an electric equipment is in on state it will be shown in yellow color and if it changes to off state the color will change from yellow to gray. According to the updates it receives, the Mobile system changes the color of the equipments displayed in the home plan. V. I MPLEMENTATION The nal implementation is obtained by conguring each of the above sub systems separately. Different technologies are used in each sub-system. A. Central Server Since the central server acts as the controlling unit of the entire system, careful analysis is needed before implementing this sub-system. During this analysis it is identied that implementing services on top of an existing server is more appropriate than developing the entire server from the scratch. Therefore Apache server and MySQL database are used in designing the server and PHP (i.e., server side scripting language) is used to implement the services. The main problem arise during implementation is how the server informs the mobile device user about the updates it receives from the home system and how the server informs the home system about the controlling signals sent by the mobile device [9]. This problem is addressed as follows. The server acts only when the mobile device or the home system polls for updates. Whenever the home system polls for updates a timestamp is added to the database. Whenever the mobile system polls, rst the server checks whether there are any updates sent by the home system. If there are updates it sends these updates to the mobile system. All these data are sent in the XML format (i.e., Extensible Markup Language). If there are no updates from the home system, then the server compares the time stamps. The current time is compared with the sum of the last time the home has polled the server and n (i.e., n is a system parameter. n can be altered according to user requirement) times of the duration between two consecutive polls. If the current time is less than this value, it implies that the home system has failed to poll the server for n or more consecutive times. This can be due to a failure in the home system. This information is transferred to the mobile system. Each mobile user can have its own poll rate declared according to the level of security required. Similarly a poll rate is assigned to the home system according to the level of automation required. If the mobile system polls the server at a higher poll rate, then itll receive updates about the home system more

frequently. Hence immediately after a change occurs at home, the mobile system receives that information. Thus the Mobile System Response time will be lowered. Mobile System Response time is the duration between the time at which the home system informs the server about updates at home and the time at which the mobile system alerts the user. Therefore higher the mobile poll rate higher the security. If the home system polls the server at a higher poll rate, then it receives the control signals sent by the mobile system more frequently. Therefore the home system responds faster. Hence higher the home poll rate lower the Home Response time. Home Response time is the duration between the time at which the mobile device user requests to change the status of particular equipment at home and the time at which the status of the equipment actually changes. B. Home System Integer HomePollrate; Request server connection; if authorized by the server then HomePollrate = request poll rate from server; end else exit; //authentication failure; end while true do suspend(1/HomePollrate); if request server for updates from home then SignalTheEquipments(); Acknowledge the server; end end Algorithm 1: How does the home system poll the server Home System has several threads of control. The Algorithm 1 represents the basic functionality of the polling thread. First the home system has to log in to the central server. If the authentication details are correct, the server will reply back with the Home Poll rate assigned to this home. Then this thread runs in an eternal loop. Inside this loop, it rst sleeps for 1/HomePollrate number of seconds. Then it sends a request to the server asking for updates (i.e., polls the server). If there are any updates it will send signals to the router. As the status of the equipment is updated according to the request the home system acknowledges the server. The other threads are used to watch the equipments. If anyone of the equipments changes its status then the server is informed about the changes. All the communication between the server and the home system is made via HTTPS (i.e., Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer) protocol in the XML format. C. Mobile Sub System The mobile system is developed in J2ME platform and behaves very much similar to the home system. If it receives any updates from the server, it will alert the user and change

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the home plan displayed in the mobile device accordingly as shown in the Figure 3.

Fig. 4. Graph of Mobile system response time against (Mobile system poll rate)1 Fig. 3. Home plan and equipments displayed on the Mobile subsystem

D. Web Conguration Tool The Web Conguration Tool is developed using JavaScript and HTML (i.e., Hyper Text Markup Language). Through the Web Conguration Tool the user can draw the home plan as mentioned above. One home can have many users, but only one home plan is used for all the users. As shown in the Figure 3, lines are used to represent walls and different shapes are used to represent the four different types of equipments. Whenever a user adds a wall, the x and y coordinates of this wall are used to identify this wall. Similarly x and y coordinates are used to identify the position of each equipment. After completely drawing the home plan the user can submit this data. All these details are sent to the server in the XML format. The server stores them in the database. The user can even change an already drawn home plan using this Web Conguration Tool. VI. R ESULTS Different poll rates can be assigned to Mobile System and Homes System. As it is mentioned in Section V-A, higher the poll rate of the Mobile system lower the Mobile System Response time. But if a high Mobile poll rate is used, then the mobile application the cost will increase since more requests are sent per unit time. Similarly if the Home poll is increased then the maximum number of homes that can be assigned to a region may decrease. Therefore it is very important to test with different poll rates and select the most appropriate poll rate based on two factors. They are Overhead per unit time The level of security required Figure 4 graph demonstrates the Mobile Response against different poll rates. Note that in all the following experiments the delays due to network congestions are ignored. A. Result Analysis Scenario 1: Change the status of equipment at home. We selected 0.1 polls/second as the Home poll rate. Mobile System poll rate is varied and the Mobile System Response time is
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measured.(See Fig. 4) According to the Fig. 4 graph it is observed that the response time of the mobile device is directly proportional to the inverse of the Mobile System poll rate. If security is a critical requirement then a higher poll rate (i.e., reduce the time between two consecutive polls) can be used. Scenario 2: Request to change the status of an equipment by mobile device. The Mobile System poll rate is kept constant at 0.1 polls per second but the home poll rate is varied and the Home Response time is measured. (See Fig. 5) According

Fig. 5. Graph of Home system response time against (Home system poll rate)1

to Fig. 5 graph, it is visible that the Home System Response Time is directly proportional to the inverse of the Home Poll Rate. That means higher the Home Poll Rate (i.e., smaller the gap between two consecutive polls) lower the Home System Response Time. Thus if the user needs the Home System to respond faster then a higher home Poll Rate can be used. B. Cost Analysis In this paragraph we are going to present the cost analysis of SmartEye. 1) Installation Cost (as in August 2008, in Sri Lanka in US$): The price of IP cameras may vary. High quality cameras are available for very high prices. The user can decide on the price. In the above table we have considered a IP camera which satises all the basic requirements.

TABLE I I NSTALLATION COST No. of Units 2 1 Cost of wired solution (US$) 12.00 100.00 Cost of wireless solution (US$) 12.00 200.00

VIII. C ONCLUSIONS In this research we tried to identify the possible areas in home automation and security that can be improved and proposed a new system which addresses them. A new home automation and security system named SmartEye was developed along with this research and tested in the real environment. The unique model designed to implement this system and different methods were discussed in detail. But since the area of home automation is very vast, more room is still available for further enhancements. R EFERENCES
[1] L. Ceccaroni and X. Verdaguer. (2004) Agent-oriented, multimedia, interactive services in home automation. Magical Mirror articulo.pdf. [Online]. Available: http://www.tmtfactory.com/articulos/ [2] A. Delgado, R. Picking, and V. Grout, Remote-controlled home automation systems with different network technologies, in 6th International Network Conference, Plymouth, UK, July 2006, pp. 357366. [3] T. Klockar, D. Carr, A. Hedman, T. Johansson, and F. Bengtsson, Usability of mobile phones, in 19th International Symposium on Human Factors in Telecommunications, Berlin, Germany, December 2003, pp. 197204. [4] U. Ali, S. Nawaz, and N. Jawad, A real-time control system for home/ofce appliances automation, from mobile device through gprs network, in Electronics, Circuits and Systems, 13th IEEE International Conference, Nice, France, December 2006, pp. 854857. [5] J. Jin, J. Jin, Y. Wang, K. Zhao, and J. Hu, Development of remotecontrolled home automation system with wireless sensor network, in Embedded Computing, 2008. SEC 08. Fifth IEEE International Symposium, Beijing, China, October 2008, pp. 169173. [6] L. Haddon, Automation: Research issues, in Second EMTEL Workshop:The European Telecom User., Amsterdam, Netherlands, November 1995. [7] APIIT-Pakistan. (2007) Ztech security and home automation. Winner Project Details.pdf. [Online]. Available: http://www.apiit.edu.pk/news/ [8] A. Gaddam, S. Mukhopadhyay, and G. Gupta, Development of a bed sensor for an integrated digital home monitoring system, in Medical Measurements and Applications, IEEE International Workshop, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada., May 2008, pp. 3338. [9] B. Yuksekkaya, A. Kayalar, M. Tosun, M. Ozcan, and A. Alkar, A gsm, internet and speech controlled wireless interactive home automation system, Consumer Electronics, IEEE Transactions, vol. 52, no. 3, pp. 837843, Augest 2006. [10] A. Mohan. (2006) Introduction to general packe t radio service (gprs). Anoop Mohan.doc. [Online]. Available: http://www.eas.asu.edu/trace/eee459/ [11] M. Danaher and D. Nguyen, Mobile home security with gprs, in ISI 2002, 2002, pp. 377380. [12] P. Lin and H. Broberg, Internet-based monitoring and controls for hvac applications, in IEEE Industry Applications Magazine, 2002, pp. 4954. [13] J. Greichen, Value based home automation for todays market, Consumer Electronics, IEEE Transactions, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 3438, Augest 1992. [14] K. Tan, T. Lee, and C. Soh, Internet-based monitoring of distributed control systems-an undergraduate experiment, IEEE Transactions on Education, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 128134, May 2002. [15] C. Ko, B. Chen, S. Hu, V. Ramakrishnan, C. Cheng, Y. Zhuand, and J. Chen, A web-based virtual laboratory on a frequency modulation experiment, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics-Part C: Applications and Reviews, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 295303, Augest 2001. [16] N. Swamy, O. Kuljaca, and F. Lewis, An internet-based educational control systems lab using net-meeting, IEEE Transaction on Education, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 145151, May 2002. [17] A. Alkar and U. Buhur, An internet based wireless home automation system for multifunctional devices, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 11691174, November 2005.

PIR sensor Detection range:140&8m IP Cam 1/3 CCD Image Sensor MPEG 4 video compression RabbitCore module Router

5 1

Total

39.00 (RCM2100) 260.00 (IEEE 802.3i 10BaseT Ethernet, Eight(8) 10/100 Mbps ports) 579.00

99.00 (RCM4400W) 90.00 (IEEE 802.11b Wireless, Two(2) 10/100 Mbps ports) 809.00

As found from the market research for an ordinary home it is enough to equip with two (2) PIR sensors, one (1) IP cam and three(3) equipments for general security and automation purposes.(Taken data from a general social survey). 2) Usage Cost (as in August 2008, in Sri Lanka in US$): The usage cost of this system is calculated based on the GPRS cost and the mobile system poll rate. If we consider the mobile system to poll the server once in every 30 seconds, the GPRS cost to be US$ 0.0002/KB , the size of the request to be 80 bytes, the size of the home plan of an average home to be 815 bytes and the size of the response from home to be 220 bytes the minimum total cost per month will be US$ 5.10. According this information, we suggest that 30 second duration between two consecutive polls of the Mobile system is suitable for a standard user. If the duration between two consecutive polls of the Mobile system is maintained around 10 seconds then the Mobile Response Time will be really low but the usage cost of the system will be US$ 10.75. If security is a very critical factor then we suggest 10 seconds as the duration between two consecutive polls of the Mobile system. VII. F UTURE W ORKS Though we try to address most of the issues associated with current home automation systems, still there is room for further improvements. SmartEye can be enhanced by sending security alerts to the regional police station when it detects a security breach. This will completely relieve the user from security threats. Currently this entire system works only with its components and does not make use of existing home automation systems. Thus SmartEye can further be improved in such a way that it will be possible to integrate with existing home automation and security systems. SmartEye can also be improved to monitor the home power consumption and take necessary actions to reduce it or warn the user if it exceeds a certain limit [12].
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