Smart Home Human Activity Simulation Tool for Openhab-Based Research
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Smart Home Human Activity Simulation Tool for OpenHab-based Research Asma Alotaibi Charith Perera Cardiff University Cardiff University Cardiff, United Kingdom Cardiff, United Kingdom [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Over the last few years, many different Internet of Things Internt of Things, Smart Homes, Human Activity Simulation (IoT) devices has been made their way into the market. As a result, many different smart home solutions have been intro- ACM Reference Format: duced by different companies. However, at this point, most of Asma Alotaibi and Charith Perera. 2019. Smart Home Human Ac- tivity Simulation Tool for OpenHab-based Research. In Technical the smart home solutions are engineering products built with Report. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ limited attention to the end-user needs. Many researchers nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn are working towards developing more meaningful smart home solutions and looking at smart home domain from different perspectives such as human-computer interactions, 1 INTRODUCTION edge computing, psychology to name a few. Another impor- Smart devices accumulate data that are then processed and tant aspect is to explore how these smart home solutions stored for subsequent analysis [22]. The analysis of this gen- could be used to facilitate independent living, disable and erated data can be utilized in several areas. One area attract- vulnerable people. Further, these smart homes systems need ing particular interest is the intelligent machine learning to be privacy-aware and secure. These research activities, methods that have the ability to provide services to those at some point, need some kind of human activity simula- living in smart homes. Consequently, the behaviour of the tion tool. Recognising this problem, this project developed a inhabitants can be modelled and anticipated using a combi- tool capable of simulating human activities in a smart home. nation of machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence Our tool allows researchers to create smart home scenarios algorithms, activity recognition algorithms, and data mining by combining different sequence of events (e.g., switch ON techniques. As such, these methods can be used to provide light, switch OFF light, Door OPEN). Once the complete insight into how best to address issues relating to home secu- scenario is defined, researchers can play it in real-time (i.e., rity and which offer the potential to help detect a wide range messages are sent to the OpenHAB smart home solution where of security threats [11, 12]. In addition, it will help anomaly OpenHAB assumes that these messages are actually coming detection in the behaviour of elderly people or the recogni- from IoT devices). OpenHAB then act accordingly (e.g., trigger tion ADLs. Furthermore, these are vital in the medical field pre-defined actions based on the messages it receive). to help diagnose medical conditions in patients [26]. How- Demo: https://youtu.be/YVKkXVcf4bo ever, such services are only possible if they are supported by Code: https://gitlab.com/IOTGarage/smart-home-simulation-tool comprehensive datasets that facilitate the testing of results so that they can be validated [7]. CCS CONCEPTS It is not easy to gain access to datasets of this nature, how- • Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mo- ever, owing to the considerable financial costs involved and bile computing. restrictions associated with the development and application of intelligent services to the home [25]. Indeed, the financial Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for cost of developing smart homes and collecting the resulting personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are data is simply too great for many projects [4, 25]. Whilst not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies recognising the need to data, the occupants’ privacy must bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third- be preserved and those ethical, technical, and legal matters party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact must be given due consideration [2, 4, 11]. Therefore, these the owner/author(s). problems can be overcome by utilising data simulation meth- Technical Report, 2019, United Kingdom © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ods which offer researchers access to rich datasets when ISBN 999-9-9999-99999-9/99/99. testing innovative data analysis methods, especially when https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn their development is at an early stage [2]. Technical Report, 2019, United Kingdom Alotaibi and Perera Contribution of this paper as follows: The main aim of this project is to develop tool is capable of simulating human activities in a smart home environment. That by publish- ing the simulation data through MQTT into the OpenHAB framework so at the end researchers can obtain a database. To achieve this, the focus has been to develop a tool that is able to publish q simulated a set of scenarios in either on real-time or the mimic time into OpenHAB. Where the first aims to get realistic data whilst the other helps researchers publish several data at a time, regardless of the actual time of the data. That was done by setting up the system interface and writing python code to publish the data using MQTT protocol into the OpenHAB interface. Furthermore, the tool is Figure 1: Block diagram for a typical IoT configuration. It able to create multiple consists of Applications and Devices communicating across different communications protocols via an IoT Framework Dataset Generation 2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK The literature shows that technology efforts concentrate to Smart home systems generate for smart homes more datasets for subsequent anal- "Smart home" is an expression that is utilized in reference ysis. These efforts can be divided into two groups as shown to home that makes use of a home controller to incorpo- in Figure 2 according to datasets that have been generated rate various automation systems that home-installed [20]. from real smart homes testbeds or utilize simulation tools Furthermore, ‘Home automation’ or ’Domotics’ are names on the smart home. Synnott et al. [25] placed the simulation known for Smart home systems. Smart home systems serve tools for smart home into two broad categories using two various purposes including the provision of energy efficiency, main approaches: model-based and interactive approaches. leisure, even the security, and convenience for homeowners A third approach uses a combination of model-based and in- by letting them control their installed smart devices using a teractive simulation; this approach is known as a hybrid [2]. Home automation app that was installed on personal devices Different smart home simulators are developed for different such as a smartphone or any other connected devices [21]. reasons based on the users’ needs, [19] Some of the purposes Smart home integration allows devices to communicate with of these simulators include dataset generated, visualization, each other using a home controller hence allowing the home- and context awareness. owner to manage his/her home through voice or button [20]. Besides the internet of things (IoT), smart home systems need to operate through IoT frameworks, as this allows them to share consumer usage data among themselves and perform automated actions on the basis of homeowners’ preferences [21]. An IoT framework is a platform for the home automa- tion application to react with smart devices. As shown in Figure 1, an IoT framework is a link among the user app that interacts with and control devices of IoT . The user applica- tion mostly communicates with the framework by Internet Protocol (IP), while the IoT device communicates through any protocol it supports, such as the MQTT protocol. There has been an emergence of open-source frameworks that have received significant corporate backing. The main benefit of an open-source framework is its ability to beuser expandable as well as manufacturer-neutral. The quality of these platforms depends on developers recognising the Figure 2: It shows the categories of the methods to generate the Smart home dataset. "The target" means the simulated importance of considering active communities. We selected approaches purpose of the creation of the dataset. OpenHAB to be used in our work due to its open-source nature and the comprehensive set of features its provides. Smart Home Human Activity Simulation Tool for OpenHab-based Research Technical Report, 2019, United Kingdom Real Smart Home Testbeds According to the rise costs involved in constructing the The Ideal pattern of some modern datasets that have focused actual smart environment as well as the ethical issues and on ADLs is the ContextAct@A4H dataset. The generation privacy needed by humans, Helal et al. Created a simulation of the dataset was done through a real apartment that has tool ’eventdriven’ to be used by researchers in the discipline different types of sensors [9]. As a result, a new annotation of the smart home. The product simulator is referred to as method that uses temporal logic has proposed by experts. the “Persim”, it can create realistic datasets for complicated A typical example of a project focussed on building a real scripts of the occupants’ behaviours [13]. smart home for the purposes of research is the work done As an improvement on discovered disadvantages, a “Per- at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Adaptive Systems sim” upgrade was developed, which Helal et al. Referred to as (CASAS)[10]. A toolkit was created named ‘the smart home ’PerSim 3D’. This tool can be used in generating real datasets in a box’ by the organisation, that can be with ease installed from the occupants’ activities depending on a smart home in a house to provide smart service simulation.