Presence detection, identification and tracking in smart homes utilizing bluetooth enabled smartphones

Abstract

Advances in ubiquitous computing over the last decade have allowed us to inch closer to the realization of true smart homes. Many sensors are already embedded in our living environments which can monitor several environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, brightness and appliance-level power consumption. However, in order to achieve the primary goal of the smart home, we should be able to detect, identify, and localize the entities inside it. Therefore, the user detection, identification and localization problems represent a crucial facet of the challenges introduced by the smart home problem. Our approach towards solving these challenges entailed the usage of Bluetooth technology for user identification and tracking, alongside a Wireless Local Area Network setup to collate the sensor data at a centralized server such as a home gateway which subsequently processed and stored the entries. Moreover, we have studied the efficacy of various pattern recognition algorithms for real time processing and decision modeling on the received data. We have hence demonstrated our solution represents a non-intrusive, inexpensive and energy-conserving methodology to solve an essential part of the smart home problem by integrating already existent devices and infrastructure in an innocuous manner to obtain good results with minimum overhead.