Multiple sensor based autonomous monitoring and control for energy efficiency

Abstract

Recently the importance of autonomous monitoring has become an essential part of the society. Autonomous monitoring and control in a home environment can lead to energy savings. Also autonomous monitoring can serve as an alerting mechanism when something is out of the norm so that the controlling mechanism can rectify the problem. In this paper we present a system we developed using multiple sensors for autonomous monitoring and control with relatively low cost components. The sensors we integrated together in to one central operation unit can monitor room temperature, humidity, human motion activity etc. We present a prototype implementation of an energy efficient home environment using our proposed centralized monitoring platform. Using a sample scenario we show that the energy consumption in a smart home is about 15kWh while that of a normal home is about 35kWh. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.