Opening the home: a web service approach to domotics

The pervasiveness of smart appliances in the home, the increase of computational power of traditional home appliances, and the widespread adoption of wireless networking are creating a unique opportunity in domotics. The challenge lies in moving from a set of isolated devices towards a network of home appliances interoperating and scaling seamlessly to provide services to the home user. The major barriers to achieve this is the abundance of non-interoperable domotics standards and the lack of a generally agreed architecture. We propose a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for the interaction of home appliances and the creation of value added services based on standard web services. In particular, we propose the use of WS-Notification as the basic layer for device interoperation. We have experimented the proposed architecture in the context of a project for the assistance of the elder citizen. We provide preliminary results for the case of fall-detection. Addressing the operability of different sensors yields, for the first time, to an integrated and scalable system that detects falls by fusing data transported via a truly vendor-independent publish/subscribe mechanism.