Future Home Environment Research Articles

The Application of Intelligent Technology in Interior Design and Its Impact on Living Experience

The development trend of intelligent residential interior design suggests that deep personalization, integration, greenness, and security will become mainstream. Designers will utilize AI technology to comprehensively understand user needs and craft unique smart home experiences. The future home environment will seamlessly integrate devices and offer efficient control methods for convenience. Additionally, there will be a heightened focus on environmental sustainability, optimizing energy usage through intelligent systems and potentially incorporating renewable energy sources to achieve zero-energy living spaces. Intelligent technology is significantly transforming interior design, guiding living spaces towards a smarter, more comfortable, and more sustainable future. Throughout this progression, design is evolving from a singular aesthetic focus to the fusion of technology and art. Designers are transitioning into technology leaders and artistic innovators, collectively shaping the future lifestyle of humanity.

Research on User Demands for Future Household Refrigerators

Refrigerators can provide activity support for users in the kitchen and other areas of the home. However, there is currently a lack of research on the demand for preservation and storage space in other household areas. By conducting semi-structured interviews with participants, we investigated user needs for future preservation and storage space. This research has generated new insights in terms of the intelligence, connectivity, emotional appeal, and ease of use of preservation and storage spaces. Our findings provide valuable insights for the design of refrigerators in future home environments and can also serve as a guide and reference for the design of other smart home appliances.

A Review of Advanced Transceiver Technologies in Visible Light Communications

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is an emerging technology that utilizes light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for both indoor illumination and wireless communications. It has the potential to enhance the existing WiFi network and connect a large number of high-speed internet users in future smart home environments. Over the past two decades, VLC techniques have made significant strides, resulting in transmission data rates increasing from just a few Mbps to several tens of Gbps. These achievements can be attributed to the development of various transceiver technologies. At the transmitter, LEDs should provide high-quality light for illumination and support wide modulation bandwidths. Meanwhile, at the receiver, optics systems should have functions such as optical filtering, light concentration, and, ideally, a wide field of view (FOV). The photodetector must efficiently convert the optical signal into an electrical signal. Different VLC systems typically consider various transceiver designs. In this paper, we provide a survey of some important emerging technologies used to create advanced optical transceivers in VLC.

未来家居环境中的数智植物产品创新设计及研究

未来家居环境中的数智植物产品创新设计及研究

OpenSHS: Open Smart Home Simulator.

This paper develops a new hybrid, open-source, cross-platform 3D smart home simulator, OpenSHS, for dataset generation. OpenSHS offers an opportunity for researchers in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning to test and evaluate their models. Following a hybrid approach, OpenSHS combines advantages from both interactive and model-based approaches. This approach reduces the time and efforts required to generate simulated smart home datasets. We have designed a replication algorithm for extending and expanding a dataset. A small sample dataset produced, by OpenSHS, can be extended without affecting the logical order of the events. The replication provides a solution for generating large representative smart home datasets. We have built an extensible library of smart devices that facilitates the simulation of current and future smart home environments. Our tool divides the dataset generation process into three distinct phases: first design: the researcher designs the initial virtual environment by building the home, importing smart devices and creating contexts; second, simulation: the participant simulates his/her context-specific events; and third, aggregation: the researcher applies the replication algorithm to generate the final dataset. We conducted a study to assess the ease of use of our tool on the System Usability Scale (SUS).

Who returns home? Study on placement outcomes of Flemish foster children

AbstractUntil recently, Flemish family foster care was a temporary measure with as its most important goal, the reunification of the foster child with the birth parents. To date, nothing is known on the number of reunifications, nor has any study been undertaken into the factors (child, parent, foster parent and foster care process) associated with reunification. Case files of 127 foster children who exited foster care in 2007 were analysed. Dependent variables were type of foster care placement outcome (reunification, successful placement without reunification or breakdown) and place of residence after placement ending (with birth parents, extended family, foster family, residential care or living independently). After placement ending, only 40% of foster children went living with their parents, including foster children who were reunified (26%) and foster children who moved to their parents after a placement breakdown (14%). Characteristics of the foster children, and in particular absence of problem behaviour, were associated mainly with a return home. This may indicate that too much attention is paid to the functioning of the foster child and too little to improving the competencies of the parents and the (future) home environment.

Development of a Multisensor Embedded Intelligent Home Environment Monitoring System Based on Digital Signal Processor and Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi has been widely adopted by families in Taiwan, for it has the advantage of designing family monitoring systems with its wide usage. Therefore, there are many advantages for designing family monitoring systems. Based on our previous research architecture, we implemented a monitoring system for family environments based on Wi-Fi and sensor technologies. Humidity, gas, smoke, and temperature sensors are applied for designing and developing the intelligent home environment monitoring system in this paper. A system prototype is proposed in this research, and the experimental results are discussed. The results showed that the system is workable and remarkable for environment monitoring. The contribution of this is to propose a framework for future home environment monitoring system developers to refer to.

A Study for Building Smart Home Environment Based on Modular Equipment Design Concept

In this paper, we propose a modular equipment design concept for building smart-home environment, which can deal with the problems such as life expectancy and complicated cable networks. Recently, the advancement of digital technology in residential networking and connections (i.e., internet cables, power cables, and network cables) has made a positive alteration to the interspatial relationship between appliances. Moreover, the interaction and communication between user and application has understood progressive changes. In future home environment, the living room is a place that has become a haven for the family and a place for entertainment as well. The downside of the new technologies is the life expectancy of the product, which is affected by a simple change to the development of digital technology.

Big Data Analytics as a Service for Affective Humanoid Service Robots

This paper identifies and analyses the advanced capability requirements for humanoid service robots to serve in highly complicated and intelligence demanding applications, such as children education and home care, in future smart home environments. In particular, a Distributed Collaboration and Continuous Learning (DCCL) mechanism is identified as the key capability of a humanoid service robot to succeed in these applications. Based on the latest Big Data Analytics tools with distributed machine learning technologies integrated as services, a novel DCCL middleware platform is developed to facilitate the realisation of the DCCL mechanism. A user preference based children toy recommendation application is introduced as a use case study of the DCCL mechanism and platform.

Design and implementation of an intelligent energy saving system based on standby power reduction for a future zero-energy home environment

Energy saving has attracted great attention as a global issue because of recent environmental problems. As a part of energy saving efforts, governments are operating policies that encourage the distribution of energy saving systems. Also, individual households are voluntarily installing energy saving systems to reduce electric power consumption. However, due to fixed system architecture, the existing systems have a disadvantage, lacking in scalability and usability. In addition, the existing systems bring up immense inconvenience as it returns to standby mode after automatic standby power cut-off. Therefore, we propose an intelligent energy saving system to solve these problems. The proposed system controls the power based on the hierarchical relationship among home appliances, along with the relationship between user activity and home appliances for standby power reduction. We designed and implemented the proposed system, deployed it in the test bed, and measured the total power consumption to verify the system performance. The proposed system reduces total power consumption up to 10.5%.

A comparative study of user-defined handheld vs. freehand gestures for home entertainment environments

Home entertainment systems have been continuously providing new functionalities to their users in a process in which they evolved from standalone electronic appliances to complex digital milieus superimposed on the home environment. Such complex entertainment environments are in need of appropriate interfaces with gestures standing as a viable option. However, designing gesture commands is a challenging task and today's designs do not always reflect users' natural gestures. For this reason, this work presents the results of a participatory study in which users were involved in the design and evaluation of gesture commands for 22 typical home entertainment tasks. This is the first study to deliver a comparison between user-defined gestures for two different capture technologies: using handheld devices to sense motion and employing freehand gestures and postures. Specifically, we found that: 1 consensus exists among participants in both scenarios; 2 when available, buttons are preferred to motion commands; 3 familiar point & click and drag & drop techniques are naturally reused for new environments; 4 one-hand gestures are preferred to bimanual gestures; 5 hand posture is important yet culture specific; and 6 body-referenced and parametrized gestures appeal to users. We report gesture sets for the handheld and freehand gesture scenarios in order to inform, assist, and inspire practitioners designing the gestural interfaces of our future home environments.

Load-dependent energy saving in future home environments

Already hundreds of millions of PCs are found in homes, offering high computing capacity without being adequately utilized. This paper reveals the potential for energy saving in future home environments, which can be achieved by sharing resources, and concentrating 24/7 computation on a small number of PCs. We present three evaluation methods for assessing the expected performance. A newly created prototype is able to interconnect an arbitrary number of homes by using the free P2P-library FreePastry. The prototype is able to carry out task virtualization by sending virtual machines (VMs) from one home to another, most VMs being of size around 4 MB. We present measurement results from the prototype. We then describe a general model for download sharing, and compare performance results from an analytical model to results obtained from a discrete event simulator. The simulation results demonstrate that it is possible to reach almost optimal energy efficiency for this scenario.

Virtualization in energy-efficient future home environments

Home environments promise high potential in terms of resource sharing and energy saving. More and more home computers are running on an always-on basis (e.g., media centers or file sharing clients). Such home environments have not been sufficiently analyzed regarding the possibility of aggregating home user resources in an energy-efficient way. This article describes a future home environment in which available hardware resources (e.g., CPU cycles, disk space, or network capacity) are shared energy efficiently and balanced among end users. Furthermore, the article provides an overview of different virtualization methods that are needed in future home environments to enable cooperation of home networks. Virtualization-related requirements are discussed in detail and virtualization methods and concepts are compared to each other with respect to their usability in the architecture.

Distributed energy efficiency in future home environments

In this paper, a new architecture for sharing resources among home environments is proposed. Our approach goes far beyond traditional systems for distributed virtualization, like PlanetLab or grid computing, as it relies on complete decentralization in a peer-to-peer (P2P) like manner and, above all, aims at energy efficiency. Energy metrics are defined, which have to be optimized by the system. The system itself uses virtualization to transparently move tasks from one home to another to optimally utilize the existing computing power. We present an overview of our proposed architecture, consisting of a middleware interconnecting computers and routers in possibly millions of homes using P2P techniques. For demonstrating the potential energy saving of distributed applications, we present an analytical model for sharing downloads, which is verified by discrete event simulation. The model represents an optimistic case without P2P overhead and fairness. The model allows to assess the upper limit of the saving potential. An enhanced version of the simulation model also shows the effect of fairness. The fairer the system gets, the less efficient it is.