564 IEEE/ASME TRANSACTIONS ON MECHATRONICS, VOL. 20, NO. 2, APRIL2015 WSN-Based Smart Sensors and Actuator for Power Management in Intelligent Buildings Nagender Kumar Suryadevara, Student Member, IEEE, Subhas Chandra Mukhopadhyay, Fellow, IEEE, Sean Dieter Tebje Kelly, and Satinder Pal Singh Gill Abstract—The design and development of a smart monitoring and controlling system for household electrical appliances in real time has been reported in this paper. The system principally mon- itors electrical parameters of household appliances such as volt- age and current and subsequently calculates the power consumed. The novelty of this system is the implementation of the control- ling mechanism of appliances in different ways. The developed system is a low-cost and flexible in operation and thus can save electricity expense of the consumers. The prototype has been exten- sively tested in real-life situations and experimental results are very encouraging. Index Terms—Energy management, home automation, intelli- gent control system, wireless sensor network, ZigBee. I. INTRODUCTION I T is foreseen that service and personal care wireless mecha- tronic systems will become more and more ubiquitous at home in the near future and will be very useful in assistive healthcare particularly for the elderly and disabled people [1]. Wireless mechatronic systems consist of numerous spatially dis- tributed sensors with limited data collection and processing ca- pability to monitor the environmental situation. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become increasingly important because of their ability to monitor and manage situational information for various intelligent services. Due to those advantages, WSNs has been applied in many fields, such as the military, industry, environmental monitoring, and healthcare [2]–[4]. The WSNs are increasingly being used in the home for energy controlling services. Regular household appliances are moni- tored and controlled by WSNs installed in the home [5]. New technologies include cutting-edge advancements in information technology, sensors, metering, transmission, distribution, and electricity storage technology, as well as providing new infor- mation and flexibility to both consumers and providers of elec- tricity. The ZigBee Alliance, wireless communication platform is presently examining Japan’s new smart home wireless system implication by having a new initiative with Japan’s Government that will evaluate use of the forthcoming ZigBee, Internet Proto- Manuscript received May 31 2013; revised October 16, 2013; accepted January 14, 2014. Date of publication February 4, 2014; date of current version October 24, 2014. Recommended by Technical Editor Y. Li. The authors are with the School of Engineering and Advanced Tech- nology, Massey University, Palmerston North 4474, New Zealand (e-mail: suryadevara99@gmail.com; s.c.mukhopadhyay@massey.ac.nz; seandtkelly@ gmail.com; satinderpalg@gmail.com). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMECH.2014.2301716 col (IP) specification, and the IEEE 802.15.4g standard to help Japan to create smart homes that improve energy management and efficiency [6]. It is expected that 65 million households will equip with smart meters by 2015 in the United States, and it is a realistic estimate of the size of the home energy management market [7]. There are several proposals to interconnect various domestic appliances by wireless networks to monitor and control such as provided in [8], [9]. But the prototypes are verified using test bed scenarios. Also, smart meter systems like [9]–[11] have been designed to specific usages particularly related to geo- graphical usages and are limited to specific places. Different information and communication technologies integrating with smart meter devices have been proposed and tested at different flats in a residential area for optimal power utilization [12], [13], but individual controlling of the devices are limited to specific houses. There has been design and developments of smart meters predicting the usage of power consumption [9]–[13]. How- ever, a low-cost, flexible, and robust system to continuously monitor and control based on consumer requirements is at the early stages of development. In this study, we have designed and implemented a ZigBee-based intelligent home energy man- agement and control service. We used the ZigBee (the IEEE 802.15.4 standard) technology for networking and communi- cation, because it has low-power and low-cost characteristics, which enable it to be widely used in home and building envi- ronments [10]. The paper focuses on human-friendly technical solutions for monitoring and easy control of household appliances. The in- habitant’s comfort will be increased and better assistance can be provided. This paper emphasizes the realization of monitoring and controlling of electrical appliances in many ways. The developed system has the following distinct features. 1) Use of Traic with opto-isolated driver for controlling elec- trical appliances: Household appliances are controlled ei- ther remotely or automatically with the help of fabricated smart sensing unit consisting of triac –BT138 [14]. 2) No microprocessor/microcontroller: The design of smart sensing unit does not require a processing unit at the sens- ing end. 3) Flexibility in controlling the appliances: Depending on the user requirements, appliances can be monitored and controlled in different ways. Section III-B discusses about the various options of controlling the devices. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II dis- cusses the related work and investigation of WSN’s constraints 1083-4435 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.