Towards a home environment testbed: Experiments with human body simulators and a real house

Abstract

This paper illustrates a design and implementation of a home environment testbed. The proposed testbed aims to support experiments on real home environments with human subjects. However, conducting experiments with real human subjects has several limitations regarding costs, time, and user privacy. In order to avoid such issues, human body simulators (HBSims), which are designed to support 24-hour in-house repeatable experiments, are employed. Using HBSims, the patterns of human humidity and temperature are generated. Based on human activity schedules together with home appliance usage time obtained from one family, HBSims were employed in experiments in a real house. The evaluation results demonstrate that (1) our proposed testbed can potentially be used for real home environment experiments and (2) HBSims can be used instead of real human subjects for studying the effects of a human body in real home environments.