Smart House Projects
There are many projects carried out by the research groups on
Universities and by Industry that investigate Intelligent Houses. The
projects focus on various elements from the design guidelines and
requirements to actual implementations of an intelligent house. The
researches address the hardware problems of the technology together
with the security, privacy or social issues related to Intelligent
Houses. Below there is a list of the most interesting and valuable
projects together with the short description of each of them.
Phillips
Phillips carries out a number of reserches into the house
technologies. All the projects are available on the Phillips ambient intelligence research site.
One of the project carried out by Phillips is called WWICE, which
stands for World Wide Information, Communication and
Entertainment. The project focuses on communication within the
house. The key element is a portable screen that can easily link to
all the devices present and serves for both control purposes and for
exchange of multimedia. Any media displayed or played on any screen or
speaker in a room can be transferred to the portable screen and vice
versa. Also a number of the devices within the house are connected
with each other, which allows the inhabitants to use the resources
provided by any piece of equipment in any room in a house. Additional
functionality is the concept of connection between different
houses. So friends can watch the same movie or listen to the same
music while having a video chat. All actions are controlled by the
user, through the portable screen, so this is an example of a
controllable house.
Another project carried out by Phillips is called PHENOM. Its
infrastructure relies on connection between different devices in a
house. So for example a photo album could be displayed in any place in
the house. Additionally there is a portable touch screen device that
can be used for managing the display of different resources. Both
projects mentioned above are being tested in a place called
HomeLab. It is a laboratory, where Phillips is testing their
projects. There are some volunteers that live in a house for a given
period and the researchers can observe their interactions with the
system. This makes the projects human centred and allows answering the
most important question of automated houses - are humans going to
actually benefit from the technology and what would be the influence
of the house automation on people. Although the PHENOM prototype
appears to be limited to displaying photos, the underlying
infrastructure is designed to learn the users preferences
automatically, so this is an example of an intelligent house
project.
Easy Access is another project researched by Philips.
The project deals with the interaction between people and a large
database with multimedia resources. In the particular implementation
that was carried out by Phillips, the database contained large music
library. The interface allowing a user to choose a song was
implemented using voice recognition technology. In particular a
"query-by-humming" functionality was created. The system is capable of
recognizing the song using a short sample that was hummed by the
user. Event though such functionality is very narrow in its usage, it
is interesting as it deals with much complicated voice analyse then
regular speech recognition. And the project, being successful reached
the "Internet-connected audio jukebox" implementation. Although the
"query-by-humming" interface is very advanced, it is directly
controlled by the user, so this is another example of a
controllable house.
E2Home company
Ericsson and Electrolux have created the E2Home company, which conducts research and development of electronic
household services for automated houses. The company offers various
applications that are controlled by a central terminal located usually
in the kitchen. From such touch screen it is possible to control
lights, alarms, electronic locks, energy usage and other parameters of
the house. Also there is a feature of easy communication with services
outside of the house for example booking common areas in the
neighbourhood like a laundry. Additionally it is a possibility to
access the home services when an inhabitant is for example at work by
using a mobile phone or Internet. Again, the advanced features
developed by theE2Home company are directly controlled by the user, so
this is an example of a controllable house.
While developing all the above mentioned functionalities e2Home is
focusing on the aspects that they find most important. Those are the
user friendly interface, security, privacy and the relevance of the
services. And what is particularly interesting in the e2Home efforts
is the fact that it succeeded in the real life
implementations. Besides of the typical houses for testing the e2Home
products, a Ringblomman condominium in Stockholm, was created. The
condominium consists of 59 IT apartments, each of them equipped with
the control panel providing the functionalities offered by E2Home
Company. Hence the inhabitants have control over their house or can
for example check their emails from the terminal. There is a great
focus on communication with the condominium itself for example booking
the common areas like laundry or sauna, contacting the administrator
or ordering some food. The investment was really popular and all the
flats were sold out long before the end of the construction.
TRON
The Japanese project TRON stands for The Real-time system Nucleus. This project is
carried out at the University of Tokyo and focuses on such concepts as
ubiquitous computing, small size of devices, natural human interfaces
and security. The researchers deal with both software and hardware,
providing mostly the interfaces and design guidelines for their
creations. Nevertheless they also create different implementations.
One of them is a TRON Intelligent House, which was created in 1989 in Nishi Azabu
in Japan and existed for three years. It merged traditional wooden
architecture with information technology. All the media received from
outside like TV or phone together with the internal data from intercom
or security sensors were put together in the display units available
in each room. Additionally there was a central control panel and a
general purpose remote control. Hence the house had the exact
combination of features described in the section above with no
unnecessary gadgets. Still during its existence period it got some
negative opinions from the press, showing how sceptical people are to
the idea of the technology that would surround them everyday. The TRON
architecture allows humans to interface with the sensors and media
through a central contro panel or a general purpose remote control. It
is therefore another example of a controllable house.
House_n
House_n is a project being carried out on the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. The main goal of the project is to create a living
space to study the interaction of people and the technology that
surround them. The biggest focus is put on the influences of the
technology on health of inhabitants. For this reason the project is
unusual and interesting at the same time. It provides the most
important data about the technologies. What is their influence on
people, how people would react after a long of using particular
technologies. The house is capable of recognition different activities
and has some simple programmable issues. For the purpose of
identification of human activities different sensors are
introduced. For example thermometers, humidity or C02 sensors,
microphones or touch sensors in doors and furniture were
introduced. As the project focus on people the development is then
human driven. For that reason, the proposed functionalities are
generally the simpler ones, which are at the same time very important
for people, e.g., control of the temperature or air conditioning. The
project identifies many interesting applications of intelligent
house technologies, but it is unclear how many of the ideas that
have actually been implemented.
Oxygen is an
umbrella project in ambient intelligence supported by a number of
individual research groups at MIT. The key elements of its
implementations are the devices embedded in the houses, cars or
offices or the handheld devices with similar functionality. The Oxygen
project focuses on many different aspects of ambient intelligence, one
of which is combining speech recognition with recognition of facial
expressions, lips movement and gaze to better understand the
intentions of the humans that the system serves. From the project web
page, it appears that the vision puts the human in control of the
operation, so it is another example of a controllable house
(the programmed evolution managed by the GOALS infrastucture is
primarily directed towards software evolution and not the smart house
control system).
AHRI
The Aware Home Research Initiative (AHRI) at Georgia Institute of
Technology addresses future domestic technologies. In their 470 square
meters home, the AHRI project focuses on various applications of
Smart Houses. The technology for controlling various equipment in the
house relies on the gesture recognition. To make its usage natural and
convenient a special gesture pendant was introduced. The pendant is a
device that contains a wireless camera and a pendant with a good
design and small size would not disturb people using it. An inhabitant
of the house has to carry the pendant with him all the time and all
the gesture has to be performed just in front of it. This means that
the project is another example of a controllable
house.
Adaptive House
The Adaptive House project is in general related only to the Intelligent House technology.
The project is being carried out by Michael C. Mozer at the University
of Colorado in Boulder. In the vision defined by the project it is
highlighted that the house is intelligent and that it has many
advantages over a programmable house. The functionalities of the
project focus on the most basic and profitable need for the
intelligent in the houses which is energy conservation. The
implemented house completely controls the heating, ventilation, air
conditioning, hot water and interior lights. The goal of the house is
to minimise the use of those resources, but at the same time to ensure
the comfort of the inhabitants. All decisions are made by the house
control system, which is implemented using neural networks. The
decisions are of course made in a proper manner, so the inhabitants
are observed and different scenarios are identified, recognition of
these scenarios allows the house to control heating or ventilation. As
a result the house starts controlling the house parameters according
to the preferences of inhabitants. The house had a real live
implementation which resulted in all those basic system working very
well. Currently, the project investigates possible extensions of the house
capabilities. One of those is the prediction of when the inhabitants
are going to return home in order to switch on heating at the right
time. And finally the lights in the house are intended to be
controlled in such a way, that the proper light patterns would be set
and the lights could be switched on and off automatically, when an
inhabitant is going from one room to another. The successful
implementation of the house resulted in a large collection of research
papers on the project website. The papers deal with hardware, neural
networks, learning algorithms and also deals with mathematical models
or with psychological issues related with the Intelligent House. The
focus on automatic scenario identification and the application of
neural networks means that this is an example of an intelligent
house project.
Microsoft House
The
House of the future made by Microsoft is a flat with a surface
area around 750 square meters, which is created in one of the
buildings on Microsoft's campus in Washington and it is not actually a
true research place. It is a place full of electronic that forms a
vision of how possibly the living spaces could look like in the
future. It does not try to dictate the future, but rather to present
some possible scenarios. The house, which by its visitors may be
called a "Disneyland style demo", is presenting a lot of advanced
technological solutions. The electronic devices are interconnected
with each other. The house gives the possibility to check emails on
the TV screen. A projector in the Kitchen allows displaying different
media on the wall and there is a place with huge screen that is a
centre for the home entertainment - music, movies or videos. Also the
touch screen outside the main entrance to the house can record a
message that later could be shown in various places inside the
house. For the controlling purposes there are pocket PCs that are
embedded in the walls in different places of the house. It is possible
to control the media devices in the house and additionally other
equipment, like all the lights. The project focus on the integration
of media and control, where the inhabitant is direct control, so this
is another example of a controllable house
AIRE
The AIRE research
group at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory creates software components for various applications. The
majority of them deals with intelligent spaces and the infrastructure
necesary to support and interact with an intelligent space. They try
to cover all the important fields of the intelligent spaces
development like the human computer interfaces, resource management,
knowledge representation, computational needs, communication,
distribution, parallelism etc. The current focus is on work spaces
rather than living spaces, but the technologies that they develop are
not limited to the office environment. Among their projects is a very
interesting one, which is an Intelligent Room prototype space. The purpose of
this prototype is to study different types of human-computer
interaction. The most important mean of controlling the room is the
voice. For the best audio quality the users have a small wireless
microphone attached to their clothes. Hence a user can speak in any
point of the room, but there is a special procedure that needs to be
performed. The computer processing the speech is initially in the
sleeping mode. For activating the computer a user has to stop speaking
and say a keyword "computer". Then all what is said is being
processed, searching for a known command. After a wile the computer is
going to sleep mode again. Theoretically the Intelligent Room can
recognise naturally spoken language. Still there is a trade of between
the performance and the variety of grammar structure that the system
can recognised. Hence there is a need to use specified grammar
structures for controlling the room. Also there is an improvement
using context recognition functionality. For example when a video is
being displayed at the moment, the computer tries to use the set of
grammar that involves controlling the video stream and the display.
Additionally to the voice commands there is a functionality that is
similar to gesture recognition. The system in a room can recognise
when a user is pointing at a display. This system can then be used to
interact with a personal computer instead of using a traditional
mouse. Still the technology can be used in other purposes as
well. During the tests of Intelligent Room it was noticed how changes
in placement of sensors, changes in ambient lights and shadows can
influence the reliability of the visual recognition. The current
implementation of the technology is therefore only reliable in fixed
environments, which means that it is not a very promising one. As part
of the overall Oxygen project the work of the
AIRE group is also an example of controllable house research.
The projects mentioned above have been have been classified according
to our taxonomy. The results of
this classification is shown in the figure below.
