A Cyber-Physical-System-Based Prototype for Smart Housing Using Z-wave Sensors

Abstract

Ever since the inception phase of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0, the Cyber Physical System has been an active research area. Its applications in sensing technology have been proposed to monitor structural and human health, and some of them are also widely used. However, there are limited applications to apply such information technology to assess the healthiness of a house and the living quality of its occupants. This work first conducts a Systematic Review on understanding how the Cyber Physical System has changed our everyday life. This study then researches and designs the architecture of a Cyber Physical System based smart house embedded with Wireless Sensor Network, enables a database to collect data from different sources, and realizes a prototype to monitor and control the environment. The study considers a house as a system and deploys smart devices as well as software packages for a month to measure the indoor house conditions and outdoor climate including temperature, humidity, lighting level, motion, ultraviolet level and tamper. An online survey, a site inspection and house occupant’s activity data have been developed and recorded to provide additional information. Our findings offer core information of possible indoor and outdoor environment in a typical New Zealand house from winter to spring, stress the issue of cold and dampness caused by lack of heating appliances, and link the information of house occupants’ activities, human behaviours and the surrounding environment to the changes on house conditions. The experimental study only provides one-month sensor data in one house as a result of limited time and space. However, this work suggests a promising way for BRANZ to collect information on house conditions by using sensing technologies and such prototype could also be upgraded easily to satisfy further requirements of smart home users. The applications of this study could be promoted to areas, for instance, health care, home security and surveillance. Further studies are recommended to focus on the energy efficiency of the smart house, thermal comfort of house occupants and impacts of climate change on house occupants.