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Sensors for Home Automation and Security

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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2017) | Viewed by 87480

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Prof. Dr. Subhas Mukhopadhyay

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Guest Editor

School of Engineering, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
Interests: smart sensors; sensing technology; WSN; IoT; ICT; smart grid; energy harvesting
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Hemant Ghayvat

E-Mail Website
Co-Guest Editor

Computer Science and Media Technology Department, Linnaeus University, 392 34 Växjö, Sweden
Interests: ambient assisted living; preventive healthcare monitoring; smart home and health informatics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Nagender Kumar Suryadevara

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Co-Guest Editor

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Geethanjali College of Engineering and Technology, Cheeryal (V) Keesara, R.R.Dist, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, 501301
Interests: data mining; artificial intelligence; computing in mathematics; natural science; engineering and medicine

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Wireless home automation and security system model existed in the past, but, in the last decade, due to the prompt development of wireless sensing technologies, a large number of various types of “smart homes” have been developed. Smart homes domain, as a part of home automation and security, are needed to be intelligent and context-aware. The major wireless technologies used to implement these systems include Z-Wave, Insteon, Wavenis, Bluetooth, WiFi, and ZigBee. Numbers of equivalent names are used for the smart home system, e.g., home monitoring, home automation and security, assistive living system, intelligent home and smart home. A system controller, house extensive wiring network, heterogeneous sensors, communication protocols, standard interfaces (outlet designs) for joining other products, and basic user controls are the elements of the smart home system.

Smart homes are not only limited to just turning on and off a device but also monitor the internal environment and the activities that take place while the house is occupied. The outcome of these amendments to the technology is that a smart home can now monitor the happenings of the occupant. Moreover, they individually operate devices on a set of predefined patterns, or independently, as the user requires. Taking into consideration the recent developments in home technology, smart home automation can be explained as an implementation of pervasive computing and sensing. This smart home technology is capable of delivering context-aware, automated and assistive services to home monitoring and remote control. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is one of the smart home applications, which comprises interoperable concepts, products, and services, which integrate new information and communication technologies (ICT) and home environments with the aim to improve and enhance the quality of life for people in all stages of life.

This Special Issue aims to publish original, significant and visionary papers describing scientific methods and technologies that improve efficiency, productivity, quality and reliability in all areas of wireless home automation and security. This Special Issue will provide a broad platform for publishing the many rapid advances that have been currently achieved in the area of wireless home automation and security. In this Special Issue we would like to focus on understanding what should be done to improve the sensing awareness to human. Submissions of scientific results from experts in academia and industry worldwide are strongly encouraged.

Contributions may include, but are not limited to:

Intelligent sensors and actuators for homes, buildings and infrastructures
Real-time control and optimization
Distributed, networked and collaborative systems
Big data and real-time data processing
Wireless Communication protocols and implementation
Modelling and analysis of physical components and environment
Modelling, analysis and integration of human activities
Energy efficiency in homes, buildings and infrastructures
Practical deployment and case studies
Anomaly detection in smart home environment
Innovative wireless sensing and computing systems or prototypes
Innovative use of smartphones or mobile tablets for smart homes
Cloud-based data processing for human-awareness in home automation
IOT and cloud computing for Smart environment
Real-time and semantic web services

Prof. Dr. Subhas Mukhopadhyay
Guest Editor

Dr. Hemant Ghayvat
Prof. Dr. Nagender Kumar Suryadevara
Co-Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Smat Home
Smart Building
Wireless Sensor Networks
Home Automation
Security

Published Papers (13 papers)

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Research

5296 KiB

Open AccessArticle

‘HighChest’: An Augmented Freezer Designed for Smart Food Management and Promotion of Eco-Efficient Behaviour

by Manuele Bonaccorsi, Stefano Betti, Giovanni Rateni, Dario Esposito, Alessia Brischetto, Marco Marseglia, Paolo Dario and Filippo Cavallo

Sensors 2017, 17(6), 1357; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17061357 - 11 Jun 2017

Cited by 14 | Viewed by 6666

Abstract

This paper introduces HighChest, an innovative smart freezer designed to promote energy efficient behavior and the responsible use of food. Introducing a novel human–machine interface (HMI) design developed through assessment phases and a user involvement stage, HighChest is state of the art, featuring smart services that exploit embedded sensors and Internet of things functionalities, which enhance the local capabilities of the appliance. The industrial design thinking approach followed for the advanced HMI is intended to maximize the social impact of the food management service, enhancing both the user experience of the product and the user’s willingness to adopt eco- and energy-friendly behaviors. The sensor equipment realizes automatic recognition of food by learning from the users, as well as automatic localization inside the deposit space. Moreover, it provides monitoring of the appliance’s usage, avoiding temperature and humidity issues related to improper use. Experimental tests were conducted to evaluate the localization system, and the results showed 100% accuracy for weights greater or equal to 0.5 kg. Drifts due to the lid opening and prolonged usage time were also measured, to implement automatic reset corrections. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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856 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Security-Enhanced Push Button Configuration for Home Smart Control

by Junghee Han and Taejoon Park

Sensors 2017, 17(6), 1334; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17061334 - 08 Jun 2017

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 4020

Abstract

With the emergence of smart and converged home services, the need for the secure and easy interplay of various devices has been increased. Push Button Configuration (PBC) is one of the technologies proposed for easy set-up of a secure session between IT and consumer devices. Although the Wi-Fi Direct specification explicitly states that all devices must support the PBC method, its applicability is very limited. This is because the security vulnerability of PBC can be maliciously exploited so that attackers can make illegitimate sessions with consumer devices. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel Security-enhanced PBC (SePBC) scheme with which we can uncover suspicious or malicious devices. The proposed mechanism has several unique features. First, we develop a secure handshake distance measurement protocol by preventing an adversary sitting outside the region from maliciously manipulating its distance to be fake. Second, it is compatible with the original Wi-Fi PBC without introducing a brand-new methodology. Finally, SePBC uses lightweight operations without CPU-intensive cryptography computation and employs inexpensive H/W. Moreover, it needs to incur little overhead when there is no attack. This paper also designs and implements the proposed SePBC in the real world. Our experimental results and analysis show that the proposed SePBC scheme effectively defeats attacks on PBC while minimizing the modification of the original PBC equipment. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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1887 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Bluetooth Low Power Modes Applied to the Data Transportation Network in Home Automation Systems

by Josu Etxaniz and Gerardo Aranguren

Sensors 2017, 17(5), 997; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17050997 - 30 Apr 2017

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 4080

Abstract

Even though home automation is a well-known research and development area, recent technological improvements in different areas such as context recognition, sensing, wireless communications or embedded systems have boosted wireless smart homes. This paper focuses on some of those areas related to home automation. The paper draws attention to wireless communications issues on embedded systems. Specifically, the paper discusses the multi-hop networking together with Bluetooth technology and latency, as a quality of service (QoS) metric. Bluetooth is a worldwide standard that provides low power multi-hop networking. It is a radio license free technology and establishes point-to-point and point-to-multipoint links, known as piconets, or multi-hop networks, known as scatternets. This way, many Bluetooth nodes can be interconnected to deploy ambient intelligent networks. This paper introduces the research on multi-hop latency done with park and sniff low power modes of Bluetooth over the test platform developed. Besides, an empirical model is obtained to calculate the latency of Bluetooth multi-hop communications over asynchronous links when links in scatternets are always in sniff or the park mode. Smart home devices and networks designers would take advantage of the models and the estimation of the delay they provide in communications along Bluetooth multi-hop networks. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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345 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Improving Biometric-Based Authentication Schemes with Smart Card Revocation/Reissue for Wireless Sensor Networks

by Jongho Moon, Donghoon Lee, Youngsook Lee and Dongho Won

Sensors 2017, 17(5), 940; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17050940 - 25 Apr 2017

Cited by 85 | Viewed by 4458

Abstract

User authentication in wireless sensor networks is more difficult than in traditional networks owing to sensor network characteristics such as unreliable communication, limited resources, and unattended operation. For these reasons, various authentication schemes have been proposed to provide secure and efficient communication. In 2016, Park et al. proposed a secure biometric-based authentication scheme with smart card revocation/reissue for wireless sensor networks. However, we found that their scheme was still insecure against impersonation attack, and had a problem in the smart card revocation/reissue phase. In this paper, we show how an adversary can impersonate a legitimate user or sensor node, illegal smart card revocation/reissue and prove that Park et al.’s scheme fails to provide revocation/reissue. In addition, we propose an enhanced scheme that provides efficiency, as well as anonymity and security. Finally, we provide security and performance analysis between previous schemes and the proposed scheme, and provide formal analysis based on the random oracle model. The results prove that the proposed scheme can solve the weaknesses of impersonation attack and other security flaws in the security analysis section. Furthermore, performance analysis shows that the computational cost is lower than the previous scheme. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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4445 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Design and Implementation of an Intelligent Windowsill System Using Smart Handheld Device and Fuzzy Microcontroller

by Jing-Min Wang, Ming-Ta Yang and Po-Lin Chen

Sensors 2017, 17(4), 830; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17040830 - 11 Apr 2017

Cited by 18 | Viewed by 7195

Abstract

With the advance of science and technology, people have a desire for convenient and comfortable living. Creating comfortable and healthy indoor environments is a major consideration for designing smart homes. As handheld devices become increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, this paper proposes an innovative use of smart handheld devices (SHD), using MIT App Inventor and fuzzy control, to perform the real-time monitoring and smart control of the designed intelligent windowsill system (IWS) in a smart home. A compact weather station that consists of environment sensors was constructed in the IWS for measuring of indoor illuminance, temperature-humidity, carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration and outdoor rain and wind direction. According to the measured environment information, the proposed system can automatically send a command to a fuzzy microcontroller performed by Arduino UNO to fully or partly open the electric curtain and electric window for adapting to climate changes in the indoor and outdoor environment. Moreover, the IWS can automatically close windows for rain splashing on the window. The presented novel control method for the windowsill not only expands the SHD applications, but greatly enhances convenience to users. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the IWS, a laboratory prototype was built and confirmed experimentally. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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645 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Analysis and Tools for Improved Management of Connectionless and Connection-Oriented BLE Devices Coexistence

by Antonio Del Campo, Lorenzo Cintioni, Susanna Spinsante and Ennio Gambi

Sensors 2017, 17(4), 792; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17040792 - 07 Apr 2017

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 4099

Abstract

With the introduction of low-power wireless technologies, like Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), new applications are approaching the home automation, healthcare, fitness, automotive and consumer electronics markets. BLE devices are designed to maximize the battery life, i.e., to run for long time on a single coin-cell battery. In typical application scenarios of home automation and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), the sensors that monitor relatively unpredictable and rare events should coexist with other sensors that continuously communicate health or environmental parameter measurements. The former usually work in connectionless mode, acting as advertisers, while the latter need a persistent connection, acting as slave nodes. The coexistence of connectionless and connection-oriented networks, that share the same central node, can be required to reduce the number of handling devices, thus keeping the network complexity low and limiting the packet’s traffic congestion. In this paper, the medium access management, operated by the central node, has been modeled, focusing on the scheduling procedure in both connectionless and connection-oriented communication. The models have been merged to provide a tool supporting the configuration design of BLE devices, during the network design phase that precedes the real implementation. The results highlight the suitability of the proposed tool: the ability to set the device parameters to allow us to keep a practical discovery latency for event-driven sensors and avoid undesired overlaps between scheduled scanning and connection phases due to bad management performed by the central node. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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11597 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Activity Learning as a Foundation for Security Monitoring in Smart Homes

by Jessamyn Dahmen, Brian L. Thomas, Diane J. Cook and Xiaobo Wang

Sensors 2017, 17(4), 737; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17040737 - 31 Mar 2017

Cited by 39 | Viewed by 6557

Abstract

Smart environment technology has matured to the point where it is regularly used in everyday homes as well as research labs. With this maturation of the technology, we can consider using smart homes as a practical mechanism for improving home security. In this paper, we introduce an activity-aware approach to security monitoring and threat detection in smart homes. We describe our approach using the CASAS smart home framework and activity learning algorithms. By monitoring for activity-based anomalies we can detect possible threats and take appropriate action. We evaluate our proposed method using data collected in CASAS smart homes and demonstrate the partnership between activity-aware smart homes and biometric devices in the context of the CASAS on-campus smart apartment testbed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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1225 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Off the Shelf Cloud Robotics for the Smart Home: Empowering a Wireless Robot through Cloud Computing

by Javier Ramírez De La Pinta, José María Maestre Torreblanca, Isabel Jurado and Sergio Reyes De Cozar

Sensors 2017, 17(3), 525; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17030525 - 06 Mar 2017

Cited by 10 | Viewed by 6113

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the possibilities offered by the integration of home automation systems and service robots. In particular, we examine how advanced computationally expensive services can be provided by using a cloud computing approach to overcome the limitations of the hardware available at the user’s home. To this end, we integrate two wireless low-cost, off-the-shelf systems in this work, namely, the service robot Rovio and the home automation system Z-wave. Cloud computing is used to enhance the capabilities of these systems so that advanced sensing and interaction services based on image processing and voice recognition can be offered. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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2021 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Novel Hierarchical Fall Detection Algorithm Using a Multiphase Fall Model

by Chia-Yeh Hsieh, Kai-Chun Liu, Chih-Ning Huang, Woei-Chyn Chu and Chia-Tai Chan

Sensors 2017, 17(2), 307; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17020307 - 08 Feb 2017

Cited by 60 | Viewed by 7929

Abstract

Falls are the primary cause of accidents for the elderly in the living environment. Reducing hazards in the living environment and performing exercises for training balance and muscles are the common strategies for fall prevention. However, falls cannot be avoided completely; fall detection provides an alarm that can decrease injuries or death caused by the lack of rescue. The automatic fall detection system has opportunities to provide real-time emergency alarms for improving the safety and quality of home healthcare services. Two common technical challenges are also tackled in order to provide a reliable fall detection algorithm, including variability and ambiguity. We propose a novel hierarchical fall detection algorithm involving threshold-based and knowledge-based approaches to detect a fall event. The threshold-based approach efficiently supports the detection and identification of fall events from continuous sensor data. A multiphase fall model is utilized, including free fall, impact, and rest phases for the knowledge-based approach, which identifies fall events and has the potential to deal with the aforementioned technical challenges of a fall detection system. Seven kinds of falls and seven types of daily activities arranged in an experiment are used to explore the performance of the proposed fall detection algorithm. The overall performances of the sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy using a knowledge-based algorithm are 99.79%, 98.74%, 99.05% and 99.33%, respectively. The results show that the proposed novel hierarchical fall detection algorithm can cope with the variability and ambiguity of the technical challenges and fulfill the reliability, adaptability, and flexibility requirements of an automatic fall detection system with respect to the individual differences. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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2090 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Novel Physical Layer Assisted Authentication Scheme for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

by Qiuhua Wang

Sensors 2017, 17(2), 289; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17020289 - 04 Feb 2017

Cited by 25 | Viewed by 4424

Abstract

Physical-layer authentication can address physical layer vulnerabilities and security threats in wireless sensor networks, and has been considered as an effective complementary enhancement to existing upper-layer authentication mechanisms. In this paper, to advance the existing research and improve the authentication performance, we propose a novel physical layer assisted authentication scheme for mobile wireless sensor networks. In our proposed scheme, we explore the reciprocity and spatial uncorrelation of the wireless channel to verify the identities of involved transmitting users and decide whether all data frames are from the same sender. In our proposed scheme, a new method is developed for the legitimate users to compare their received signal strength (RSS) records, which avoids the information from being disclosed to the adversary. Our proposed scheme can detect the spoofing attack even in a high dynamic environment. We evaluate our scheme through experiments under indoor and outdoor environments. Experiment results show that our proposed scheme is more efficient and achieves a higher detection rate as well as keeping a lower false alarm rate. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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3159 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Novel Secure IoT-Based Smart Home Automation System Using a Wireless Sensor Network

by Sandeep Pirbhulal, Heye Zhang, Md Eshrat E Alahi, Hemant Ghayvat, Subhas Chandra Mukhopadhyay, Yuan-Ting Zhang and Wanqing Wu

Sensors 2017, 17(1), 69; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17010069 - 30 Dec 2016

Cited by 189 | Viewed by 20772

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provide noteworthy benefits over traditional approaches for several applications, including smart homes, healthcare, environmental monitoring, and homeland security. WSNs are integrated with the Internet Protocol (IP) to develop the Internet of Things (IoT) for connecting everyday life objects to the internet. Hence, major challenges of WSNs include: (i) how to efficiently utilize small size and low-power nodes to implement security during data transmission among several sensor nodes; (ii) how to resolve security issues associated with the harsh and complex environmental conditions during data transmission over a long coverage range. In this study, a secure IoT-based smart home automation system was developed. To facilitate energy-efficient data encryption, a method namely Triangle Based Security Algorithm (TBSA) based on efficient key generation mechanism was proposed. The proposed TBSA in integration of the low power Wi-Fi were included in WSNs with the Internet to develop a novel IoT-based smart home which could provide secure data transmission among several associated sensor nodes in the network over a long converge range. The developed IoT based system has outstanding performance by fulfilling all the necessary security requirements. The experimental results showed that the proposed TBSA algorithm consumed less energy in comparison with some existing methods. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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3189 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Novel Visual Sensor Coverage and Deployment in Time Aware PTZ Wireless Visual Sensor Networks

by Florence G. H. Yap and Hong-Hsu Yen

Sensors 2017, 17(1), 64; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17010064 - 30 Dec 2016

Cited by 10 | Viewed by 4460

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the visual sensor deployment algorithm in Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) Wireless Visual Sensor Networks (WVSNs). With PTZ capability, a sensor’s visual coverage can be extended to reduce the number of visual sensors that need to be deployed. The coverage zone of a visual sensor in PTZ WVSN is composed of two regions, a Direct Coverage Region (DCR) and a PTZ Coverage Region (PTZCR). In the PTZCR, a visual sensor needs a mechanical pan-tilt-zoom operation to cover an object. This mechanical operation can take seconds, so the sensor might not be able to adjust the camera in time to capture the visual data. In this paper, for the first time, we study this PTZ time-aware PTZ WVSN deployment problem. We formulate this PTZ time-aware PTZ WVSN deployment problem as an optimization problem where the objective is to minimize the total visual sensor deployment cost so that each area is either covered in the DCR or in the PTZCR while considering the PTZ time constraint. The proposed Time Aware Coverage Zone (TACZ) model successfully captures the PTZ visual sensor coverage in terms of camera focal range, angle span zone coverage and camera PTZ time. Then a novel heuristic, called Time Aware Deployment with PTZ camera (TADPTZ) algorithm, is proposed to solve the problem. From our computational experiments, we found out that TACZ model outperforms the existing M coverage model under all network scenarios. In addition, as compared to the optimal solutions, the TACZ model is scalable and adaptable to the different PTZ time requirements when deploying large PTZ WVSNs. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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1277 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Compound Event Barrier Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks under Multi-Constraint Conditions

by Yaoming Zhuang, Chengdong Wu, Yunzhou Zhang and Zixi Jia

Sensors 2017, 17(1), 25; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17010025 - 24 Dec 2016

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 4670

Abstract

It is important to monitor compound event by barrier coverage issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Compound event barrier coverage (CEBC) is a novel coverage problem. Unlike traditional ones, the data of compound event barrier coverage comes from different types of sensors. It will be subject to multiple constraints under complex conditions in real-world applications. The main objective of this paper is to design an efficient algorithm for complex conditions that can combine the compound event confidence. Moreover, a multiplier method based on an active-set strategy (ASMP) is proposed to optimize the multiple constraints in compound event barrier coverage. The algorithm can calculate the coverage ratio efficiently and allocate the sensor resources reasonably in compound event barrier coverage. The proposed algorithm can simplify complex problems to reduce the computational load of the network and improve the network efficiency. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is more effective and efficient than existing methods, especially in the allocation of sensor resources. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Home Automation and Security)

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