Sensor Technology for Smart Homes

Book excerpt: This Special Issue presents the recent advances in sensor technologies for smart homes, including fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors for detecting the presence and number of occupants, the Internet of things for monitoring CO2 concentration, and designing a novel eye-tracking system for monitoring and controlling a smart home, and infrared thermal sensors for fall detection. Such new explorations are pushing the boundary of sensing technologies and, thus, will have more profound implications for the future smart home. Advanced machine learning and data mining algorithms have been proposed to address sensor failure, appliance identification, and human activity recognition in a home environment. These results will enable a promising, sustainable deployment of sensing technologies. A novel multi-agent gamification system is proposed for managing tasks between household members and between families, which demonstrate another dimension of future smart home application. This Special Issue concludes with a review on sensors for human activity recognition. This work paves the roadmap for deploying smart home systems in different socioeconomic contexts. The whole Special Issue has significantly helped to shape our understanding of the strength, implications, and barriers of deploying long-term, sustainable, sensor technologies for smart homes.