2015 Online International Conference on Green Engineering and Technologies (IC-GET 2015)
A Review on Smart Home Technology
Shruthi Suresh
Department of Computer Science
Cochin College of Engineering and Technology
Valanchery, India
shruthisuresh@cochincet.ac.in, shruthigvr@gmail.com
Abstract—Smart Home domain is a new trendy way of home
automation and energy conservation. The increasing demand on
home automation and self care for the elderly and the disabled
persons has led to the increasing number of research works and
academic publications in this domain. To date, there is no
comprehensive survey on research papers based on home
automation. The main objective of this paper is to identify the
main applications of various home automation technologies and
future enhancements needed in this field. The paper also reviews
the different energy conservation ideas that are implemented in
the field of smart homes.
Keywords—smart homes; energy conservation; survey of home
automation technologies; self care for disabled; assistance for
elderly people.
I. INTRODUCTION
American Association of House Builders announced
the first official version of smart home in 1984. After that,
there was a rapid growth in this field. The word Smart home is
not restricted to the dwelling. But it has a broad meaning in
this technological environment. Smart home has a broad sense
of intelligent living or smart living. The usage of computer
augmented technology as Smart Communities, Smart cities,
and Smart Factories elaborate the smart home concept beyond
the residing home. In this paper we are using the word smart
living instead of smart home because it seems more accurate.
The main goal of this paper is to provide an overall idea about
the technological advancement carried out in the smart living
domain. This paper also proposes the areas where the scholars
or technicians place more attention for a useful evolution of
intelligent living technologies.
Smart home is one of the promising technological
advancement in the field of automation and management
systems. Various research works were carried out in home
automation filed. A decade ago, technology-augmented homes
were an underexplored field of research but are now emerging
tremendously.
This paper provides an overview of current issues
and proper directions for technology-augmented home
research based on an extensive literature survey. The primary
goals of a smart home are to facilitate standard living,
minimize energy conservation, and make self sufficient for
elderly or disabled persons.
978-1-4673-9781-0/15/$31.00 © 2015 IEEE
Sruthi P V
Department of Computer Science
Cochin College of Engineering and Technology
Valanchery, India
sruthipv@cochincet.ac.in, sruthi056@gmail.com
II. REVIEW ON CURRENT SMART HOME TECHNOLOGIES
In this project, we have used three search engines
such as Google scholar, Scopus and Web of Science for
collecting the latest publications in the field of smart living.
Smart homes, smart living, intelligent living, home automation
and intelligent computing were the main key words we have
used in this searching. The outcome was an enormous
collection of sample papers. We mainly focus on the
publications directly related to smart living concept. So
publications with at least one of the keyword in the title,
abstract or keyword list were selected. We have collected the
papers that contribute some review on smart home
technologies. Such selection criteria excluded the papers with
highly technical in nature such as telecommunication,
networking, and information technology. To make the paper
scientifically reliable, we have surveyed conference
proceedings, books and journals with more than 50 citations.
After this process, a collection of 150 publications were
recognized.
Projects based on intelligent living are conducted
mainly on experiment environment. This shows the
unexploratory phase of this domain and lack of advanced
scientific studies. There are a lot of financial and technological
issues which need more attention by both practitioners and
scholars. The major questions in this regard are: what are the
unexploratory applications and who will receive the actual
benefit of the smart living concepts. There are so many areas
that need much attention.
In the medical sector, a Smart Home is defined as an
environment for monitoring, and assisting elderly or disabled
persons or patients in the rural sectors. It mainly deals with the
improvement of quality of health and health care. There are a
number of e-health and telemedicine projects in the field of
smart homes.
In the construction fields, a Smart Home is a
dwelling environment that automates or controls all the
devices by networking and sensor technologies. There are
enormous projects that developed to provide a standard living
in urban homes. The latest technologies like sensors,
intelligent computing, robotics, network computing, and
 2015 Online International Conference on Green Engineering and Technologies (IC-GET 2015)
telecommunications have evolved and useful for developing
new ideas in Smart living concept.
The energy management systems associated with the smart
living mainly deals with efficient provision, co-production and
consumption of energy. Smart Meter projects are the perfect
example we can found all over the world.
III. ADVANTAGES OF SMART LIVING
People with chronic illness, disabled people and old people
residing at home alone are mostly benefitted by Smart home
application. This smart technology of assessment can improve
the quality of the information passed to doctors. A particular
action can be initiated by integrating behavioral patterns and
psychological sign readings with sirens and alarms.
Telecare schedule visits with health staff and community
health workers automate collection of clinical findings and test
results and thus can provide facilities for coordinating
multidisciplinary care outside the hospital. Home tele
monitoring of chronic diseases is a promising patient centric
management model that provides data with accuracy and
reliability, empowers patients, influences their attitudes and
behaviors, and potentially enhances their medical condition.
With Telecare services, patients become more responsible, self
managers with knowledge of task, experts and informed. It has
benefits such as accessibility to different services and
locations of quality care. Generally, patients are favorable
towards telemedicine. Many patients have agreed that they are
satisfied with the benefits of telemedicine, including lesser
waiting times to be seen, improved access to care, reduced
costs to the health care model and impressions that distance
exams are more thorough than conventional exams. Most of
the patients prefer to have a tele-consultation than travelling to
see a doctor, as it saves time and money.
IV. DISADVANTAGES OF SMART LIVING
Certain barriers in social, ethical and legal issues hinder
widespread adoption of this technology, especially electronic
health records (EHR) due to complex electronic models and
lack of access to investment capital by health care service
providers, and lack of standards that permit exchange of
clinical data. Physicians suffer from a lack of financial support
and huge investment costs required for implementing EHRs,
e-prescribing, and decision support models. Additional costs
are required for system maintenance and during the transition
from the old paper records to EHRs, there is decreased
revenue from patients.
Another obstacle appears with the time and effort spent on
learning how to use these technologies. One of the study
suggested that technology has been the primal driver of the
increase in health care costs in the last 50 years, and the
potential of technology to increase costs in the future is
unrelieved. An aged person’s perception of privacy is one of
the activators of their adoption of smart homes that could
improve their quality of life and increase safety of their
homes. Privacy may be affected adversely when E- health
tools reveal more information than the personal desires.
Distrust can lead to withholding of information, disclosure of
incorrect information to health care providers, or avoidance of
the health care models. Smart home IT could adversely affect
human relationships, response and interactions. People using
this kind of technology may fear technology replacing
personal interaction with their health care providers. Informal
caregivers may fear that a greater burden will be placed on
them. Users may worry about a technology affecting their
lifestyle, financial status, emotional and psychological
wellbeing of family members. Introducing e-health systems
raises several issues: accidental disclosure of individuals,
contacting the wrong people, incorrect use of data, etc. A full
legal framework for telemedicine is still lacking.
V. CONCLUSION
The main aim of this paper is to state that, to live a life up to
expectations and realize a large-scale commercialization, the
Smart Living or Smart Home technology has to reach a higher
level of maturity, which can be done only by identifying,
analyzing and implementing a wide range of aspects, from
both technological and non-technological areas. The authors
of this paper are completely aware of the limitations, one of
which is the fact that the publications that were referred do not
contain all the existing publications related to the Smart
homes. Hence, in all probability, not all the concepts and
models are discussed in detail.
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