IEEE Communications Magazine — Communications Standards Supplement • December 2015 ABSTRACT We propose the Safe Community Awareness and Alerting Network (SCALE), a cyber-physical system (CPS) leveraging the pervasive Internet of Things (IoT) to extend a smarter, safer home to all residents at a low incremental cost. SCALE uses novel networking technolo- gies, commodity sensor devices, cloud services, and middleware abstractions to sense, analyze, and act on sensed events in a distributed manner. It monitors environmental factors (i.e. smoke, explosive gas) and automat- ically alerts residents via phone upon discovery of a possible emergency, enabling them to con- frm the event and contact emergency dispatch- ers with minimal effort. This article describes the inception, design, development, and deployment of a prototype system to achieve these goals. We discuss lessons learned and future directions for general CPS/IoT platforms. INTRODUCTION With the increasing pervasiveness of computers in our daily lives, the Internet of Things (IoT) concept is transitioning from a future prediction to real-world deployments. With this manifes- tation comes a myriad of possible applications, from manipulating devices in our homes to large- scale automation of industries and public utili- ties. A common human-facing aspect of each of these applications is that they aim to improve our quality of life through inexpensive, common- ly available technology. While home security systems have existed for decades, they are rath- er expensive services, and only in recent years have we seen components become cheap and available enough that hobbyists experiment with do-it-yourself systems. So it seems natural that an open system, made possible with these recent advances, should be created to improve the lives of under served populations that previously could not afford such advanced home security and safety monitoring systems. This motivation led our team, assembled in response to the SmartAmerica Challenge, 1 to envision, design, build, and demonstrate the Safe Community Awareness and Alerting Network (SCALE). SCALE aims to improve the safety of resi- dents through the use of modern connected devices and computer systems, particularly low- er-income and elderly residents who often do not have access to advanced technologies such as home security systems, smartphones, and com- puters with Internet connections. To accomplish this goal, we designed an event-driven distributed system to sense safety-related data from devic- es in homes or on individuals, analyze it locally or within the cloud to detect possible emergen- cy events, and automatically contact individuals (e.g. homeowners, caretakers, even emergency dispatchers) to notify them and confrm if there is indeed an emergency. We implemented a pro- totype of this system and deployed it in Mont- gomery County, Maryland, USA to enable rapid integration of components and testbeds from dif- ferent partners. The immediate goals of the SCALE project are: • Demonstrate our ability to extend a con- nected safe home to everyone at a low incremental cost. • Jump-start a live testbed for identifying and researching IoT challenges (e.g. middle- ware, networking, etc.). • Identify suitable sensors, data schemas, and algorithms for detecting possible emer- gency events. • Implement and test work- fows for cloud-based analytics and alerting. • Demonstrate an open data platform for connecting disparate systems with minimal coordination. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE SCALE devices upload sensed events, and the analytics service looks for possible emergencies, it sends residents emergency alerts to confrm or reject, and interested individuals (i.e. emergency dispatchers) visualize events through a dashboard. This section discusses the high-level requirements, logical components, architectural design decisions, and implementation details of the system proto- type. It first discusses a cloud data exchange and then the components of the system that perform sensing, analysis, and actuation. CLOUD DATA EXCHANGE FOR IOT To facilitate machine-to-machine (m2m) com- munication for exchanging IoT data in SCALE (sensed events, analytics, alerts, etc.), we pro- pose the Data in Motion Exchange (DIME) sys- tem, shown in Fig. 1. We envisioned DIME as an open communications hub for IoT that simplifes the development and deployment processes. DIME allows any device or service to publish or subscribe to any other data feed, regardless of the protocols used at the device level. This simple loose coupling enables developers to incorporate new services and devices without the need to modify existing ones. This simplifes sys- tem evolution, and it also creates a level playing feld for innovation. Any party can introduce new SCALE: S AFE C OMMUNITY A WARENESS AND A LERTING L EVERAGING THE I NTERNET OF T HINGS The authors propose the Safe Community Awareness and Alerting Network (SCALE), a cyber-physical system (CPS) leveraging the pervasive Internet of Things (IoT) to extend a smarter, safer home to all residents at a low incremental cost. SCALE uses novel networking technologies, commodity sensor devices, cloud services, and middleware abstractions to sense, analyze, and act on sensed events in a distributed manner. Kyle Benson, Charles Fracchia, Guoxi Wang, Qiuxi Zhu, Serene Almomen, John Cohn, Luke D’Arcy, Daniel Hofman, Mathew Makai, Julien Stamatakis, and Nalini Venkatasubramanian COMMUNICATIONS TANDARD S S 27 0163-6804/15/$25.00 © 2015 IEEE Kyle Benson, Guoxi Wang, Qiuxi Zhu, and Nalini Venkatasubrama- nian are with University of California. Charles Fracchia is with BioBright. Serene Almomen and Julien Stamatakis are with Senseware, Inc. John Cohn is with IBM. Luke D’Arcy is with Sigfox. Daniel Hoffman is with Montgomery County. Matthew Makai is with Twilio. 1 http://smartamerica. org/