International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 44– No.22, April 2012 26 Enhancing the Human-System comprehension in a Smart Home System using Pervasive Computing Celine Maria Amrita A. S., Harini S., Kiran Sharmilee D, S. Swarna Parvathi Department of Information Technology, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering Pennalur, Sriperumbudur, Kancheepuram District, Tamil Nadu, India ABSTRACT In a home environment, human actions consist mainly of routines which are performed at approximately the same time every day, and one routine is broken only to be replaced by another. This paper is based on a pervasive interaction with the inhabitants of a house to provide an enhanced Smart Home experience. This paper proposes a probabilistic model to manipulate the environmental information from sensors and identify the actions of the household inhabitants, by exploiting the fact that household activities encompass routines. This paper also shows the simulation of a smart home system, which uses this probabilistic model to adapt to one‟s habits, by identifying one‟s intensions and accordingly transforming the household environment to support the user‟s intended actions. 1 INTRODUCTION A smart home system integrates the electrical devices in a house and allows control of the devices through a personal computer or remote control. The techniques employed in home automation include control of domestic activities such as home entertainment systems, lighting system, pet feeding and changing the ambience for different events such as parties or dinners. The devices may be controlled via the computer network and may be accessed remotely from the internet. By integrating the concepts of information technology with the home environment, systems and appliances are able to interact in a seamless manner which results in convenience; energy efficiency and safety benefits. The existing smart home systems depend on explicit commands from the inhabitants. It ignores the fact that one can perform routine actions in their day-to-day life. This can be overcome by using the ideas of pervasive computing in order to predict the actions based on information from various kinds of sensors and thereby eliminating the need for an explicit human-system interface, such as voice commands or button presses from the household inhabitants. The system being developed is a simulation of the home environment in 2D, which graphically depicts the actions that take place around the house, including user‟s action and the resulting transformation of the home environment. The system uses a probabilistic algorithm to identify user‟s actions. In order to build a smart home system, there is a need for a Home Service Gateway to interconnect the household devices to the controlling system and for this purpose we use the Open Service Gateway Initiative OSGi Framework. There is also a need for sensors and controllers, for which we use virtual devices which are OSGi bundles that interact with the OSGi framework. Sensors to collect information about the household environment and communicate this information to the framework; and controllers which pass on control information from the framework to various household devices. 2 BACKGROUND A background on the project can be obtained by understanding the following terminologies and concepts. 2.1 Context Information The information collected from the sensors concerning the home environment is called context information. As there are various kinds of sensors which can provide information of the environment, such as position sensors, light intensity sensors, temperature sensors, etc. there are a variety of context information that are available . This context information is manipulated to understand the current situation, and thereby give the desired transformation of the home environment for the situation. Thus the smart home can become situation aware and provide a greater a degree of ease. 2.2 OSGi A variety of household appliances, multimedia, communication and security protection devices are connected and controlled conveniently by a general remote control device which is called Home Service Gateway. Up to now, OSGi is the most popular service gateway, which is compatible with many existing standards. The home service gateway based on OSGi supports interconnection of a variety of information house hold appliances; it could autonomously construct a single dynamic Smart home network which contains a variety of appliances, communication devices and computers by the self- adapting mechanism of OSGi. The Open Services Gateway initiative framework is a module system and service platform for the Java programming language that implements a complete and dynamic component model. Applications or components in the form of bundles for deployment can be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated and uninstalled without requiring a reboot. More information on OSGi can be obtained from [4]. Fig. 1 OSGi Architecture