Remote Supervision of the Home Environment from Mobile Terminals

Home automation has been an active and intense area of research since the times when electricity was made available widely. Home automation comprises a number of sub-areas, among which is home monitoring, and home surveillance. Interest in home monitoring has just begun to emerge as a number of sensors become available, exhibiting ever increasing sophistication and offered capabilities. This paper reports on the development and experimentation of a novel extensible platform for the monitoring of the home environment, which allows complex event processing by collecting measurements from sensor that are deployed in a home environment as a stream of events, and using knowledge engineering techniques for detecting the events of interest to be communicated to the user's mobile phone, allowing thus a user to monitor its home from remote locations. Experiences with the platform are also presented in the paper.