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The Advent of Smart Homes

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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Energy Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2018) | Viewed by 71738

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Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Sehyun Park

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Department of Intelligent Energy and Industry, Chung-Ang University, Seoul 06974, Republic of Korea
Interests: smart energy; carbon neutrality; digital platform; AI-based data; digital twins; smart buildings and cities
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Smart Home originated from Home Automation, a concept that was on the rise in the late 1980s. Home Automation allowed household appliances to be controlled remotely through On/Off switches, telecommuting through email, and the supply of various contents through cable TV. Since the 2000s, ubiquitously, the concept that people can access networks at any time without locational constraints, appeared and this led to the development towards connecting all home appliances to a communication system, thus, aiming to create a network-oriented smart home environment. However, there were prevalent limitations in providing meaningful value to users and the society at large through home-appliance-oriented Smart Home technology, and the development of Smart Home soon entered a period of stagnation.
More recently, the supply of mobile entities, the improvement of wireless Internet, the emergence of Cloud Services, the sophistication of low-energy high-performance energy technologies, and other forms of convergence technologies based Internet of Things (IoT) have opened a new era for Smart Home technology. IoT-oriented Smart Home aims to collect human-machine interaction, then analyze, predict, and utilize information in solving life problems. Based on this, Smart Home is shifting to Smart Space, a paradigm that solves potential personal and societal problems and further provides new value to the world. There is ongoing various research developments on the subject of Smart Space, and new business models and service platforms are emerging.
Though the development of Smart Homes fluctuates, Smart Home by nature exists in the heart of human life and thus has the potential to be the starting point of solving modern world problems such as pollution, the economical gap between nations, increase in energy costs, global aging, etc. In other words, technologies that increase Smart Home’s sustainability also contribute significantly to the sustainability of environment, culture, economy, and society. Thus, the purpose of the Special Issue is to exchange ideas and thoughts on technologies that enhance Smart Home sustainability from an environmental, cultural, economical, and societal viewpoint, additionally sharing various technologies that can contribute to the shift from Smart Home to Smart Space. We invite you to be apart of this cross-disciplinary experimental and theoretical research on the future of Smart Home.

Keywords

Environmental sustainability

Climate change responses of smart homes
Indoor air quality and energy management technologies
Eco-friendly business and service model for smart home sustainability

Cultural sustainability

Appropriate technologies of smart homes for developing countries
User-friendly smart home technologies for Information Minority Group
Role of cultural context in the acceptance of smart home technologies

Economic sustainability

Low cost zero-energy house for smart home sustainability
Cost-effective smart home design technologies
Economic evaluation of smart home service model

Social sustainability

Healthcare and wellness service in smart homes
Ecological smart home technologies for solving social problems
Safety, privacy, and trust in smart home

Sustainability from smart homes to smart space

Retrofit design of smart homes for smart space
Internet of things and big data in future smart home
Green energy technologies for smart space
Valuable service and hyper-connected platform for smart space

Published Papers (10 papers)

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Research

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18 pages, 4082 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Sustainable Home Energy Prosumer-Chain Methodology with Energy Tags over the Blockchain

by Lee Won Park, Sanghoon Lee and Hangbae Chang

Sustainability 2018, 10(3), 658; https://doi.org/10.3390/su10030658 - 01 Mar 2018

Cited by 115 | Viewed by 8209

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to provide a power trade system that will promote a sustainable electrical energy transaction ecosystem between prosumers and consumers of smart homes. We suggest a blockchain-based peer-to-peer (P2P) energy transaction platform be implemented to enable efficient electrical energy transaction between prosumers. We suggest the platform be built on the blockchain, as this technology allows a decentralized and distributed trading system, and allows a more transparent, trustworthy and secure P2P trading environment. We believe that such characteristics of the blockchain are necessary in electrical energy transactions within the smart home environment because the smart home aims to enhance user comfort and security, along with energy conservation and cost-savings. First, we classify the two different types of P2P trade to identify which will best benefit from the use of the suggested blockchain-based P2P energy-transaction platform. Within the two types of P2P trade, that we classify (pure P2P trade and hybrid P2P trade), the hybrid P2P trade will benefit more from a blockchain-based P2P energy-transaction platform. In the blockchain-based P2P energy-transaction platform, a smart contract is embedded in the blockchain and called an energy tag. The energy tag will set conditions for making every future energy transaction more cost-efficient while maintaining the most ideal and high-quality energy selection. With the blockchain-based energy tag in the energy-transaction process, multiple energy resources and home appliances will be democratically connected in order to provide users with high-quality, low-cost energy at all times and locations. In this paper, we provide simulation results that compare the unit price of electrical energy on the suggested platform to the unit price of electrical energy set by currently existing conventional power-generation companies. Additionally, we present simulation results that calculate how long initial investments to create a smart home environment that enables P2P energy transactions will take to be paid back. Based on simulation results, we believe that, in the long run, the suggested blockchain-based P2P energy-transaction platform will create a sustainable energy-transaction environment between consumers and prosumers, and the expanding ecosystem will enable the development of a trusted, sustainable, secure and energy-efficient energy transaction environment. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Advent of Smart Homes)

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15 pages, 2457 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Zone-Aware Service Platform: A New Concept of Context-Aware Networking and Communications for Smart-Home Sustainability

by Jinsung Byun, Sanguk Park, Keonhee Cho and Sehyun Park

Sustainability 2018, 10(1), 266; https://doi.org/10.3390/su10010266 - 20 Jan 2018

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3881

Abstract

Recent advances in networking and communications removed the restrictions of time and space in information services. Context-aware service systems can support the predefined services in accordance with user requests regardless of time and space. However, due to their architectural limitations, the recent systems are not so flexible to provide device-independent services by multiple service providers. Recently, researchers have focused on a new service paradigm characterized by high mobility, service continuity, and green characteristics. In line with these efforts, improved context-aware service platforms have been suggested to make the platform possible to manage the contexts to provide the adaptive services for multi-user and locations. However, this platform can only support limited continuity and mobility. In other words, the existing system cannot support seamless service provision among different service providers with respect to the changes of mobility, situation, device, and network. Furthermore, the existing context-aware service platform is significant reliance on always-on infrastructure, which leads to great amounts of energy consumption inevitably. Therefore, we subsequently propose a new concept of context-aware networking and communications, namely a zone-aware service platform. The proposed platform autonomously reconfigures the infrastructure and maintains a service session interacting with the middleware to support cost- and energy-efficient pervasive services for smart-home sustainability. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Advent of Smart Homes)

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16 pages, 2388 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Energy Storage System Control Algorithm by Operating Target Power to Improve Energy Sustainability of Smart Home

by Byeongkwan Kang, Kyuhee Jang, Sounghoan Park, Myeong-in Choi and Sehyun Park

Sustainability 2018, 10(1), 236; https://doi.org/10.3390/su10010236 - 17 Jan 2018

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3528

Abstract

As energy issues are emerging around the world, a variety of smart home technologies aimed at realizing zero energy houses are being introduced. Energy storage system (ESS) for smart home energy independence is increasingly gaining interest. However, limitations exist in that most of them are controlled according to time schedules or used in conjunction with photovoltaic (PV) generation systems. In consideration of load usage patterns and PV generation of smart home, this study proposes an ESS control algorithm that uses constant energy of energy network while making maximum use of ESS. Constant energy means that the load consumes a certain amount of power under all conditions, which translates to low variability. The proposed algorithm makes a smart home a load of energy network with low uncertainty and complexity. The simulation results show that the optimal ESS operating target power not only makes the smart home use power constantly from the energy network, but also maximizes utilization of the ESS. In addition, since the smart home is a load that uses constant energy, it has the advantage of being able to operate an efficient energy network from the viewpoint of energy providers. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Advent of Smart Homes)

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4272 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Smart Thermostats: An Experimental Facility to Test Their Capabilities and Savings Potential

by Sergio Bustamante, Pablo Castro, Alberto Laso, Mario Manana and Alberto Arroyo

Sustainability 2017, 9(8), 1462; https://doi.org/10.3390/su9081462 - 17 Aug 2017

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 5773

Abstract

The European Commission has explained how heating and cooling in buildings and industry account for half of the energy consumption of the EU. Several studies explain how to achieve an energy saving at home, and the use of smart thermostats will help to reduce energy consumption while increasing the efficiency of households. In this article, a comparative evaluation was carried out between four smart thermostats that are now on the market, whose characteristics vary in terms of price, precision of measurements and set temperature, algorithms, etc. A thermal test chamber was designed and constructed from a refrigerator, a thermal blanket, a Raspberry Pi and the necessary electronic components for its control and data collection. From the tests carried out in the thermal chamber, data on the operation of the four thermostats such as the maintenance and the anticipation of the setpoint temperature, were obtained. It was necessary to run the system enough times for each thermostat to memorize the housing characteristics, such as its inertia and its thermal insulation. This would also allow for the generation of a better algorithm to regulate the temperature, which would create a lower oscillation with respect to the setpoint temperature. The learning of the thermostats was not demonstrated and for the anticipation mode it was seen that the thermostats failed to improve or learn in this aspect, as they did not improve the start-up times of the heating system, with the consequent increase in energy consumption. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Advent of Smart Homes)

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580 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Adjustable Green Defaults Can Help Make Smart Homes More Sustainable

by Nicole D. Sintov and P. Wesley Schultz

Sustainability 2017, 9(4), 622; https://doi.org/10.3390/su9040622 - 17 Apr 2017

Cited by 25 | Viewed by 8732

Abstract

Smart home technologies offer exciting opportunities to promote more efficient uses of energy. For instance, programmable thermostats, centralized lighting controls, and rooftop solar panels all have potential for energy conservation and efficiency. However, these technologies alone will not guarantee energy savings. Whereas previous research on smart homes has focused on the technologies themselves, relatively little work has addressed the factors that shape the human-technology interface. In this review paper, we argue that in order to ensure any savings, smart home technologies must first be adopted by end-users, and once adopted, they must be used in ways that promote energy efficiency. We focus on three areas of behavioral research with implications for smart home technologies: (1) defaults; (2) perceived adjustability or control; and (3) trust in automation. Linking these areas, we propose a new concept for improving the efficiency gains of smart homes. First, although smart device controls can help save energy, considerably larger energy efficiency gains can be realized through smart automation. But importantly, the default settings of systems should be “green”, to maximize energy savings. Second, many people have concerns around relinquishing decision-making to technologies, which can reduce the likelihood of adoption. People want to be, or at least to feel, in control of their homes, even if they do not adjust settings post-installation. Further, consumer trust in technologies encourages adoption in the first place; trust also impacts consumer interactions with installed devices and can impact default acceptance. Combining these concepts, we recommend that smart home technologies build consumer trust and come pre-programmed with adjustable green defaults, which permit consumers to change initial green settings. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Advent of Smart Homes)

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2712 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The PeRvasive Environment Sensing and Sharing Solution

by Paolo Bellavista, Carlo Giannelli and Riccardo Zamagna

Sustainability 2017, 9(4), 585; https://doi.org/10.3390/su9040585 - 11 Apr 2017

Cited by 16 | Viewed by 4398

Abstract

To stimulate better user behavior and improve environmental and economic sustainability, it is of paramount importance to make citizens effectively aware of the quality of the environment in which they live every day. In particular, we claim that users could significantly benefit from cost-effective efficient Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions that provide them with up-to-date live information about air pollution in the areas where they live, suitably adapted to different situations and with different levels of dynamically selected granularities (e.g., at home/district/city levels). Our PeRvasive Environment Sensing and Sharing (PRESS) project has the ambition of increasing users’ awareness of the natural environment they live in, as a first step towards improved sustainability; the primary target is the efficient provisioning of real-time user-centric information about environmental conditions in the surroundings, and in particular about air pollution. To this purpose, we have designed, implemented, and thoroughly evaluated the PRESS framework, which is capable of achieving good flexibility and scalability while integrating heterogeneous monitoring data, ranging from sensed air pollution to user-provided quality perceptions. Among the elements of technical originality, PRESS exploits extended Kura IoT gateways with novel congestion detection and recovery mechanisms that allow us to optimize bandwidth allocation between in-the-field PRESS components and the cloud. The reported performance results show the feasibility of the proposed solution, by pointing out not only the scalability and efficiency of the adopted message-based solution that uses Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and WebSockets, but also the capability of PRESS to quickly identify and manage traffic congestions, thus, ensuring good quality levels to final users. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Advent of Smart Homes)

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2184 KiB

Open AccessArticle

SH-SecNet: An Enhanced Secure Network Architecture for the Diagnosis of Security Threats in a Smart Home

by Saurabh Singh, Pradip Kumar Sharma and Jong Hyuk Park

Sustainability 2017, 9(4), 513; https://doi.org/10.3390/su9040513 - 28 Mar 2017

Cited by 27 | Viewed by 10219

Abstract

The growing demand for an independent and comfortable lifestyle has motivated the development of the smart home, and providing security is a major challenge for developers and security analysts. Enhancing security in the home environment has been recognized as one of the main obstacles to realizing the vision of creating energy-efficient smart homes and buildings. Understanding the risks associated with the use and potential exploitation of information about homes, end-users, and partners, as well as forming techniques for integrating security assessments into the design, is not straightforward. To address this challenge, we propose enhanced secure network architecture (SH-SecNet) for the diagnosis of security threats in the smart home. In our architecture, we use the Multivariate Correlation Analysis (MCA) technique to analyze the network flow packet in the network layer, as this classifies the network traffic by extracting the correlation between network traffic features. We evaluated the performance of our architecture with respect to various parameters, such as CPU utilization, throughput, round trip time, and accuracy. The result of the evaluation shows that our architecture is efficient and accurate in detecting and mitigating attacks in the smart home network with a low performance overhead. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Advent of Smart Homes)

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1808 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Distributed Demand Side Management with Battery Storage for Smart Home Energy Scheduling

by Omowunmi Mary Longe, Khmaies Ouahada, Suvendi Rimer, Ashot N. Harutyunyan and Hendrik C. Ferreira

Sustainability 2017, 9(1), 120; https://doi.org/10.3390/su9010120 - 14 Jan 2017

Cited by 51 | Viewed by 6247

Abstract

The role of Demand Side Management (DSM) with Distributed Energy Storage (DES) has been gaining attention in recent studies due to the impact of the latter on energy management in the smart grid. In this work, an Energy Scheduling and Distributed Storage (ESDS) algorithm is proposed to be installed into the smart meters of Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing consumers possessing in-home energy storage devices. Source of energy supply to the smart home appliances was optimized between the utility grid and the DES device depending on energy tariff and consumer demand satisfaction information. This is to minimize consumer energy expenditure and maximize demand satisfaction simultaneously. The ESDS algorithm was found to offer consumer-friendly and utility-friendly enhancements to the DSM program such as energy, financial, and investment savings, reduced/eliminated consumer dissatisfaction even at peak periods, Peak-to-Average-Ratio (PAR) demand reduction, grid energy sustainability, socio-economic benefits, and other associated benefits such as environmental-friendliness. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Advent of Smart Homes)

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2822 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Towards Sustainable Smart Homes by a Hierarchical Hybrid Architecture of an Intelligent Agent

by K. Yang and Sung-Bae Cho

Sustainability 2016, 8(10), 1020; https://doi.org/10.3390/su8101020 - 13 Oct 2016

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 4192

Abstract

A smart home can be realized by the provision of services, such as building control, automation and security implemented in accordance with a user’s request. One of the important issues is how to respond quickly and appropriately to a user’s request in a “dynamic environment”. An intelligent agent infers the user’s intention and provides the intact service. This paper proposes a smart home agent system based on a hierarchical hybrid architecture of a user intention model, which models the user intention as a hierarchical structure and implements it in a dynamic environment. The conventional rule-based approach needs to obtain all information before it is executed, which requires a large number of rules and is hardly scalable as the control objects are increasing. On the other hand, the proposed system consists of several modules that construct a hierarchical user intention model. The smart home system needs to take account of the information, such as time, state of device and state of the home, in addition to users’ intention. We evaluate the performance of the proposed system in a dynamic environment and conduct a blind test with seven subjects to measure the satisfaction of service, resulting in the average score of 81.46. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Advent of Smart Homes)

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Review

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1897 KiB

Open AccessReview

Healthcare in the Smart Home: A Study of Past, Present and Future

by Jamie Bennett, Osvaldas Rokas and Liming Chen

Sustainability 2017, 9(5), 840; https://doi.org/10.3390/su9050840 - 17 May 2017

Cited by 55 | Viewed by 14166

Abstract

Ubiquitous or Pervasive Computing is an increasingly used term throughout the technology industry and is beginning to enter the consumer electronics space in its most recent form under the umbrella term: “Internet of Things”. One area of focus is in augmenting the home with intelligent, networked sensors and computers to create a Smart Home which opens a host of possibilities for the role of tomorrow’s dwelling. As the world’s population continues to live longer and consequently experience more medical-related ailments, at the same time institutional healthcare is struggling to cope, the role of the Smart Home becomes paramount to monitoring a dweller’s health and providing any necessary intervention. This study looks at the history of Smart Home Healthcare, current research areas, and potential areas of future investigation. Unique categorisations are presented in Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and Personal Sensors, and a thorough look at the application of Smart Home Healthcare is presented. Technology can augment traditional methods of healthcare delivery and in some cases completely replace it. Costs can be reduced and medical adherence can be increased, all of which contribute to a more sustainable and effective model of care. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Advent of Smart Homes)

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