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Developing Smart Home Applications

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Abstract

This paper utilizes an IoT platform called IoTtalk to shape “intelligence” into a house to make it a smart home. The developed project is called HomeTalk that serves as a platform to accommodate various smart applications in a house. We describe the following HomeTalk applications. The PlantTalk application takes care of house plants. The FishTalk application provides fish comfortable life in the fish tank at home. The BreathTalk application detects the number of people in a room, which also purifies the air. The TheaterTalk application uses home and special appliances to create the effects for a 4D experience theater at home. The FrameTalk application allows a painting frame to interact with people in a house. The GardenTalk application provides smart gardening. By examining these projects, this paper explicitly identifies and generalizes the features of HomeTalk that provides flexibility to reuse these IoT devices by sharing them among various smart home applications simultaneously. Specifically, we show how these applications share the sensors and actuators in the house. In the future, we will integrate them through an award winning project called Orchid House.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Prof. Yi-Bing Lin for guidance and steers in this work, and also for his helpful comments on this paper.

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Center for Open Intelligent Connectivity from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, and Ministry of Science and Technology 108–2221-E-009-047, Ministry of Economic Affairs 107-EC-17-A-02-S5–007.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Artificial Intelligence, National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Tainan, Taiwan

    Yun-Wei Lin

  2. Graduate Institute of Architecture, National Chiao Tung University(NCTU), Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Sheng-Kai Tseng

  3. Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Jyun-Kai Liao & Ta-Hsien Hsu

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  1. Yun-Wei Lin
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  2. Sheng-Kai Tseng
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  3. Jyun-Kai Liao
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  4. Ta-Hsien Hsu
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Correspondence to Yun-Wei Lin.

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Appendix. Scalability, Replicability, Interoperability, and Extensibility

Appendix. Scalability, Replicability, Interoperability, and Extensibility

To support scalability, replicability of the system, interoperability, and extensibility, IoTtalk is designed to be easily adopted (accommodated) by other IoT platforms and become a part of these platforms. Two ways to integrate IoTtalk with other platforms were described in [7]. For the reader’s benefit, the description in [7] is quoted and reiterated in this appendix.

In the first alternative, IoTtalk is ported on top of the target platforms such as AllJoyn and oneM2M (Fig. 19). It works because AllJoyn and oneM2M provide APIs to allow the user to build network applications. Therefore, when we port IoTtalk on top of, for example, oneM2M, it is considered as a network application of oneM2M. The porting uses oneM2M API (API1 in Fig. 19) to implement four functions: connect, disconnect, push and pull. Then all physical oneM2M devices become IoTtalk devices and can interact with the control (Arduino) boards through the IoTtalk (HomeTalk) GUI. In Fig. 19, the IoTtalk server is ported on both oneM2M (API1) and AllJoyn (API2).

Achor

Fig. 19.
figure 19

Integrating IoTtalk with other platforms

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Actually, the first version of the IoTtalk Engine was successfully built on top of an early version of oneM2M called openMTC. In Fig. 19, through the IoTtalk server, the sensor of Arduino Board can control the light bulb of oneM2M, and the smart watch of oneM2M can control water spray of AllJoyn or the fan connected to the Arduino board. Therefore, an oneM2M user may implement his/her IoT device following the oneM2M protocols and still can enable the device to interact with the IoTtalk devices.

In the second alternative, the IoTtalk GUI creates an icon for a platform to be integrated with IoTtalk. For example, IoTtalk has successfully connected to Chunghwa Telecom’s commercial IoT Gateway using this approach (Fig. 20). Both the IoTtalk server and the CHT IoT Gateway are installed in a Raspberry Pi 3. We have created an IoTtalk device called CHT-GW. The device application (DAI) connects to the CHT IoT Gateway through a web socket. In this alternative, CHT provides a command table to CHT-GW. For example, “1” represents a fan, and then under this command, the subcommand 0 represents “turn off” and so on. With this integration, the temperature sensor of the control board can interact with CHT’s home appliances through the command table. Same approach is used to integrate two independent IoTtalk platforms, i.e., the CHT IoT Gateway is replaced by another IoTtalk server in Fig. 20, which is located in a different server. In this way, multiple IoTtalk platforms are loosely coupled to achieve scalability, replicability of the system, interoperability, and extensibility.

Note that in both alternatives, IoTtalk does not modify other IoT platforms. Such integration only requires minimal porting efforts and IoTtalk does not need to know the low level details of other IoT platforms.

Fig 20.
figure 20

Integrating IoTtalk with CHT IoT Gateway

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Lin, YW., Tseng, SK., Liao, JK. et al. Developing Smart Home Applications. Mobile Netw Appl 27, 181–195 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-020-01639-8

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