In the future, smart devices will in greater extent facilitate creation of automatic behavior by the home owners. They will be able to tailor relations between smart devices of different brands in order to create event driven home automation that extends beyond the home. With new opportunities, a number of sectors will benefit from the IoT. The health sector for instance, will be able to let elderly people live longer in their own homes by using IoT technology. Smart devices with privacy preserving mechanisms can monitor and assist the elderly when it is needed. The smart devices can for instance remind them to take their medicines if they forget. Assistance can also be summoned if the smart devices are equipped with sensors to detect if the elderly falls. The smart devices can programmed to detect abnormalities to achieve this.
In the following sections, I describe my personal motivation for taking on this project followed by industrial motivation and academic motivation. The research questions are finally presented in Section 1.2.
1.1.1 Personal Motivation
From my perspective, as a developer, I find a number of different use cases for IoT technology. However, I can also imagine it has potential for causing serious problems if world wide adaptation takes place without sufficient security.
Miorandi et al. [39] emphasize that security and privacy-preserving mechanisms should be a key feature in IoT devices. Therefore, perhaps security and privacy related features in smart devices should be handled by specialized developers within that area. A separation of concerns may be appropriate, in order to allow communication experts to create some parts of the functionality and other developers to build the rest.
Dynamic Home Environments
With a low-level programming language, the possibilities for what can be achieved with a few lines of code is more limited than in higher-level languages. The com-plexity of the software increase, and the developer are able to do more general operations with less lines of code. Similarly, in the early phase of IoT, smart devices were limited to simple tasks and were not given the chance to show their full potential. As their complexity and abilities have expanded, and the standardization activities proceed to create common protocols tailored to their use, smart devices will offer simple and clever solutions for achieving advanced home automation functionality.
With homes having IoT technology embedded into surfaces and everyday objects, it will be possible to tailor more advanced automatic behavior based on the inhabitants needs. Homeowners will be able to make advanced behavior such as continuously regulating and enhancing air quality in their indoor envi-ronments to help increase productivity and prevent sleepiness. In addition to achieve good air quality, the automatic behavior could also be based on profiles for minimizing power consumption. Smart devices placed in various locations could detect air composition around them and share the data on the internet.
Additionally, they could be linked to devices controlling air vents or windows.
The data generated by both the air composition devices and the air vent
con-1.1. PROJECT MOTIVATION 3
trollers, could be aggregated and analyzed with data from thousands of other homes in order to analyze and study the effects of ventilation. Advanced opti-mized models for ventilation could then be created and applied to all the homes through software updates.
Smart picture frames, speaker systems and colored lights can for instance be used to create dynamic environments, configured to reflect events around the world. For some people, it is important to only be interrupted when it is important. Events on social media can be interpreted and visualized as colored decorative light in their living rooms in order to discretely indicate new hap-penings. This way, they can discover the signs of new notifications later when they are ready to seek the information themselves. Colored light and vibration in the floor are both examples of how ubiquitous smart devices can be used for encoding information into their environments.
Controlling the Home
In 2014, I worked on a project together with Caroline Sofie Olsen and Mar-tin Eskerud, where we created a mobile user interface for home automation.
The concept of a graph based interface was conceived through user participa-tory design, involving users already in the earliest phases of the design process.
The concept was later developed as an application for Android as illustrated
Figure 1.1: Illustration of theControlling the Home application.
in Figure 1.1. In order to display smart devices in the application, they are represented as device nodes, which are connected by edges to their respective rooms nodes. The smart devices are turned on and off when the user taps the device representation. Some of them, as for instance nodes representing sound volume on a smart device, can also be adjusted with a drag gesture that allows for fine-tuning of its value.
4 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
As the project was focused on the interface itself, it does not have a working back-end. In this thesis, I therefore wanted to create something that would allow me to connect a back-end to the application and enable controlling of smart devices.
1.1.2 Industrial Motivation
IoT will allow new business sectors to emerge and new products to be created.
Embedded electronics and everyday objects will come together to create new products. When the smart devices are created to follow universal standards, it may perhaps also give rise to services similar to app-stores. With a number of interconnected smart devices available, the users will be able to buy, download and install software to get new functionality.
For manufacturers and companies, IoT will bring wide applicability in ex-isting sectors and provide new opportunities. For instance, by adding Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) to products, or carts moving products around, companies are able to track their journey through the supply-chain and monitor parameters like temperatures and bacterial composition. This allows retailers to keep track of their inventory in real-time and guarantee the required quality final products [39], which will benefit both companies and consumers.
Smart clothes monitoring health parameters, could serve workers in the health sector and the patients by for instance combining various historical data to provide better understanding of each individual’s health. With a common underlying communication platform, IoT technologies will open up new busi-ness opportunities that will give rise to new cross-cutting applications and ser-vices [39].
1.1.3 Academic Motivation
When introducing new technology to the home, an important part of the design is to make it simple to use, as people often are unable to describe problems in their networks accurately [42]. Edwards et al. [18] reported that the adoption of home networks has increased over the last decades and created collisions between technical design and fundamental aspects of human nature. This causes problems for millions of users, threatening their privacy and creating barriers for adoption of next-generation applications in the home.
Miorandi et al. [39] reported in a survey paper from 2012 a clear lack of standardization activities on models, naming and format for IoT in terms of service-layer interfaces and protocols. Today, however, various standardiza-tion activities are working on creating IoT specificastandardiza-tions. Constrained RESTful Environments (CoRE) working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is one example. They have taken on the task of making a framework for applications using simple resources on constrained networks1. The working group made the specifications for Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) which will probably be an important part of smart devices in the future. Al-though there is a desire for discovery and configuration features in CoAP, CoRE reports they have not yet closed in on a specific approach for this.
Figuring out all the details for the standards might take time. Although the standardization process will happen, it may take years before all decide on
1https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-core/