Enabling Smart Homes Through Health Informatics and Internet of Things for Enhanced Living Environments

Abstract

As people spend most of their time inside buildings, indoor environment quality must be monitored in real-time for enhanced living environments and occupational health. Indoor environmental quality assessment is based on the satisfaction of the thermal, sound, light and air quality conditions. The indoor quality patterns can be directly used to promote health and well-being. With the proliferation of the Internet of Things related technologies, smart homes must incorporate monitoring solutions for data acquisition, transmission, and microsensors for several real-time monitoring activities. This paper presents a low-cost and scalable multi-sensor smart home solution based on Internet of Things for enhanced indoor quality considering acoustic, thermal and luminous comfort. The proposed system incorporates three sensor modules for data collection and use Wi-Fi communication technology for Internet access. The system has been developed using open-source and mobile computing technologies for real-time data visualization and analytics. The acquisition modules incorporate light intensity and colour temperature, particulate matter, formaldehyde, relative humidity, ambient temperature and sound sensor capabilities. The results have successfully validated the scalability, reliability and easy installation of the proposed system.