Smart Home Technology and Applications

This assignment examines the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technology with cloud computing in the context of smart homes. It discusses various applications of smart home devices, highlights the importance of security in this interconnected environment, and explores emerging trends and future possibilities for smart home technology.

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Internet of Things............................................................................................................................3
Sample layout..................................................................................................................................4
Devices............................................................................................................................................4
Concerns & Solutions......................................................................................................................7
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................9
References........................................................................................................................................9
Appendix........................................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
Internet technology has revolutionized the traditional forms of communication and has made
communication flexible and more effective. As the number of users using the internet is
increasing rapidly, new and better ways of communication, control, and management are
devised. One such revolutionary technical advancement is the Internet of Things. In Internet of
Things (IoT), there are various computing devices which are able to communicate with each
other through the internet medium and thus providing anywhere and anytime communication,
control, and management of applications. Internets of Things (IoT) have applications which can
be used in various domains ranging from household applications to business control and
monitoring systems. After its introduction in the market the users adapting Internet of Things
(IoT) based applications are increasing rapidly and it is projected that Internet of Things (IoT)
shall be the most popular technology in usage by 2020 (Gubbi, 2013). This work examines the
potential of the Internet of Things within a household dwelling. It also evaluates various
challenges related to the usage of these devices and the solutions to overcome these challenges.
Internet of Things
The concept of theinternet of things emerged from a motive to create a smart city where the
public resources available are utilized in an efficient and optimized manner such that the quality
of services is available to the public at decreased operational costs. Internet of Things thus
themain goal is to create an environment of communication where the devices and the humans
can communicate with each other at anytime from anywhere at decreased operational costs.
Internet of Things forms a network of communication were various devices are connected with
each other and thus provide the functionality of control and monitoring of these devices. Internet

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of Things is defined as a platform where various objects known as things are capable of
communicating with other objects and the world around them via the internet (Stojkoska et al,
2017). Internet of Things has been used for various kinds of applications like for personal control
and monitoring systems at homes, healthcare monitoring systems for health institutions, energy
management systems, transport and logistics management system etc. for thegeneral public and
business applications.
Sample layout
For the purpose of this work, a sample layout of a house is considered. The house has devices
like air conditioner, heating systems, smartphones, laptops, health monitoring devices like
wearable devices, electrical appliances like refrigerator, television, basic furniture, security
systems like camera etc. The generic layout of the house is given below:
Figure 1: Layout of the house
Devices

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The various Internet of Things devices available in the house are as follows:
a. Smart switch and light automation system: The house has a smart automation system for
controlling and monitoring the lighting devices, LED bulbs, the switches for various
devices like fans, exhaust fan used in thekitchen, plugs for external electrical appliances.
The smart automation system thus can control and monitor all the switches and plugs in
use, the lighting devices indoor and at the backyard of the house, the fans through a
smart-app enabled in the smartphone. Through this device a user is thus able to know
about the status of a particular switch in the house, can control it if the particular device is
not being in use, can monitor and thus can reduce the wastage of any device usage.
Through a smart-application, the user can control and monitor the lighting system and the
status of switches and plugs used for other electrical appliances (Zanella et al, 2014). In
case of any failure, the application gives thestatus of the particular switchboard failure
and thus the user knows which area to look upon. Through this controller the various
devices like arefrigerator, television can be switched on or off and energy can be
conserved in case of power failure and while running on backup.
b. Smart Sprinkler system: This system is used to automatically determine the condition of
the land of the garden, the weather outside and then schedule water for sprinkling the
lawn zones. The system automatically generates the command to open the sprinklers of
the lawns when the condition is ideal for the watering of the plants by analyzing the data
from the weather records and the land condition records (Soliman, 2013). This system
automatically adjusts the water cycles, its duration of watering the plants and the
frequency so that the lawn is healthy and green. The system keeps theuse of Wi-Fi-based
communication for triggering the sprinklers automatically. The application for controlling

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the sprinklers of the lawn is a very user-friendly application that can be installed in
smartphones and thus lawn watering is controlled using this application. Through these
smart sprinkling devices, the water is used in an efficient manner and thus water wastage
is reduced as much as possible. Moreover, this device is capable of calculating moisture
of the soil and the weather condition and thus sets the lawn into various zones. For each
zone different quantity of water and water, scheduling is done in an intelligent manner.
c. Smart Security solution: The house is having acamera installed at various places. The
smart security solution provides real-time monitoring of the door, windows, garage,
parking, lawn and the overall house outdoor areas. The door has a Bluetooth based alarm
system which sends atrigger to the monitoring devices for opening and closing of the
door, it also is enabled with the glass braking vibration sensors which send trigger alarms
in case of glass breaking vibrations. The smart security device is operational using smart-
application running on smart devices like tablet or mobile phone and is also functional
using voice commands. The user can issue a command to close the door or window, can
monitor the status of each room door and window, the lawn gates etc. Thus this system
provides overall security to the house (Stojkoska et al, 2017).
d. Wearable health monitoring devices: The house has smartwatches based health
monitoring devices for monitoring vital health status like aheartbeat, pulse rate, blood
pressure, the number of miles walked etc. The device is connected to asmartphone and
thus provides all these data to the smartphone for monitoring purpose. The devices send
all these data to user phone and the doctor associated with the family. This can help in
monitoring the key health parameters and thus the doctor can recommend any problems
associated with the health.

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Some potential devices which could be used in the house are as follows:
a. The house should have elderly people monitoring system so that the elderly people are
safe at the house. The movement of the elderly people is very minimal due to their old
age. Some of them may have difficulty to perform their daily activities. In such cases,
there is a need to have a proper monitoring of such elderly people at the house. A smart
elderly people system shall help in providing the details of the elderly people motion
through motion sensorsshall alert in case of a fall or about to fall condition, shall have
alarm through which the elderly people can trigger an alarm for help etc.
b. The smart food inventory management system can help in tracking which food item or
necessary stuff is about to reach a level of minimum and this shall trigger an inventory
alarm so that the particular food item can be replenished within the time. The user has to
select the list of items along with their quantities. The system shall keep track of the food
items at home and shall trigger analarm for inadequate stocks.
Concerns& Solutions
The internet of things based devices makes use of technology like wireless sensor networks,
RFID, Wi-Fi-based devices, Wi-Fi connections, blue tooth devices etc. These devices are
generally using thewirelesscommunication-based internet and are connected to the monitoring
devices via the internet. In such cases, it is easy for any unauthorized user to hack the access
code and use the device for their use or manipulate the devices according to their own likes. For
example, the security system is making use of Wi-Fi-based and Bluetooth based systems. These
systems can be easily hacked and thus any thief with devices likes signal jamming, code breaker
can break the password and easily open the door or windows (Zhu et al, 2015). Moreover, the

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applications used for monitoring of the security system at home can be easily manipulated using
basic kinds of cyber-attacks like phishing, spoofing, signal jamming, through virus attacks and
the entire network can be made unavailable to the user via denial of service attacks. In such
cases, the authorized user cannot himself use the system and thus shall fail to open the door or
window using this system (Singh et al, 2014). This shall require re-vamping the entire system
again after rebooting the entire hardware and software.Similarly, if a smart sprinkler application
is hijacked the entire lawn can be flooded with water supply. This shall affect the whole house
area. Thus the main challenges these devices face are from thehijacking of the signals, breaking
of the signal code, cyber-attacks of the applications etc. The IoT based applications have with the
large databases containing vital information like patient records, customer records for control
and monitoring. The privacy of the data can be attacked using various kinds of attacks like virus-
based attacks, Trojan Horses, phishing attacks, sniffing attacks etc. Spam-basedemails and
messages can be delivered to the end devices for gaining credentials and then the data can be
compromised using the phishing attacks (Botta et al, 2014).
There are various countermeasures to avoid such attacks and security issues. The communication
channel between the devices and the user should be encrypted and a strong authentication
mechanism shall protect any unauthorized user to gain access to the system. The service
providers of the internet should also follow certain strong authentication mechanism to ensure
thesafety of the services. Regular updates related to antivirus system, antimalware system are
essential to keep virus based and malware-based attacks to be aloof (Ho et al, 2016). The user
must be given training on how to use this system in asafer manner. certain guidelines like
making use of strong passwords, regular updates of the software, regular updates of antivirus
system, regular monitoring of the system settings, regular changes of passwords etc. are some

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generic measures user can employ to enhance the security of the systems (Jing et al, 2014).The
user access should be limited to few in the house and if there are multiple users for the
application then it is advisable to make user hierarchy and assign user permission to various
services based on the hierarchy (Lee et al, 2015). Such hierarchy based access control shall
provide a layer of defense in accessing vital information and getting access to the system.
Conclusion
Internet of Things has revolutionized the ways of computing and communication. Internet of
Things is a platform where various kinds of devices like smart objects are able to communicate
with each other and the environment via the internet medium. Through this communication,
humans are able to communicate with each other, control and monitor various applications, or
devices. Internet of Things thus provides facilities of anytime and anywhere communication
control and management at decreased costs. Internet of Things works using internet and wireless
form of communication and thus is prone to various kinds of security issues and regulatory
issues. It is therefore recommended to have proper planning before the Internet of Things based
applications are being used so that the communication and the data are secure from various kinds
of cyber-attacks.
References
Gubbi, J., Buyya, R., Marusic, S., & Palaniswami, M. (2013). Internet of Things (IoT): A vision,
architectural elements, and future directions. Future generation computer systems, 29(7),
1645-1660.

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Stojkoska, B. L. R., & Trivodaliev, K. V. (2017). A review of Internet of Things for smart home:
Challenges and solutions. Journal of Cleaner Production, 140, 1454-1464.
Zanella, A., Bui, N., Castellani, A., Vangelista, L., & Zorzi, M. (2014). Internet of things for
smart cities. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 1(1), 22-32.
Soliman, M., Abiodun, T., Hamouda, T., Zhou, J., & Lung, C. H. (2013). Smart home:
Integrating internet of things with web services and cloud computing. In Cloud Computing
Technology and Science (CloudCom), 2013 IEEE 5th International Conference on (Vol. 2,
pp. 317-320). IEEE.
Singh, D., Tripathi, G., & Jara, A. J. (2014). A survey of Internet-of-Things: Future vision,
architecture, challenges, and services. In Internet of things (WF-IoT), 2014 IEEE world
forum on (pp. 287-292). IEEE.
Botta, A., De Donato, W., Persico, V., & Pescapé, A. (2014). On the integration of cloud
computing and internet of things. In Future Internet of Things and Cloud (FiCloud), 2014
International Conference on (pp. 23-30). IEEE.
Zhu, C., Leung, V. C., Shu, L., & Ngai, E. C. H. (2015). Green Internet of Things for thesmart
world. IEEE Access, 3, 2151-2162.
Ho, G., Leung, D., Mishra, P., Hosseini, A., Song, D., & Wagner, D. (2016). Smart locks:
Lessons for securing commodity internet of things devices. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM
on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (pp. 461-472). ACM.
Jing, Q., Vasilakos, A. V., Wan, J., Lu, J., & Qiu, D. (2014). Security of the internet of things:
Perspectives and challenges. Wireless Networks, 20(8), 2481-2501.

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Lee, I., & Lee, K. (2015). The Internet of Things (IoT): Applications, investments, and
challenges for enterprises. Business Horizons, 58(4), 431-440.
Stojkoska, B. L. R., & Trivodaliev, K. V. (2017). A review of Internet of Things for smart home:
Challenges and solutions. Journal of Cleaner Production, 140, 1454-1464.
Appendix
Example devices:
a. Smart sprinkler Skydrop: This is a smart sprinkler that checks local weather stations
hourly for real-time weather data specific to your yard and manages water sprinkling
automatically. It consists of Push-in connectors, automatic valve sensors, and easy-to-
read LCD screen. It can get integrated with devices like nest and Echo. Price: $299.99.
b. Amazon Echo: it is a best smart home centerpiece for a central control point for your
smart home gadgets, It uses Amazon's voice-activated smart speaker for providing
automatic voice control system. Price $180.

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c. Adobe connected home security: The Company provides a base kit for security at costs of
$359 and includes the hub, two door/window sensors, one motion detector with
thecamera, and one key fob.