Engineering Smart Houses

The concept of Ubiquitous Computing has over the years become more popular in research projects world wide. The technology is continuously progressing making the computing devices more powerful, of lower price and less energy consuming. As a result the computing can be introduced to di erent places and activities that never involved computation before. The goal of the project is to investigate the application of Ambient Intelligence technologies also known as Smart Houses in home environments. A large body of research into Smart Houses has been conducted by research groups from different disciplines of information technology. As a consequence no common understanding of Smart House technology has emerged and no common terminology has been defined. In order to better understand and compare the contributions of individual projects, we have defined a taxonomy for smart houses, which focus on the aspects of who (or what) controls the Smart Houses. The result of this investigation is in part presented by this report and in part on a website intended for an audience with a technical background. The website contains enough information to give a person with technical background a picture of Smart Houses and in particular Intelligent Houses technology. For the purpose of the website a series of animations presenting different ambient intelligence technologies have been created. In order to facilitate the creation of such animations, we have developed a tool that provides some basic building blocks of smart house technology and a simple way of combining them. The basic set of functions and graphical objects are created in a way that allows for its reuse and easy extensions. The tool s specification with guidance of its usage and extension capabilities have been written and placed both in the theoretical part of the thesis and on the Smart House website. Both the website and the tool is available on the attached CD.