Embedded systems within home appliances are not usually manufactured to operate in a networked environment; connecting supplementary hardware/software systems through a wireless, PC-controlled medium is necessary to enable full, efficient control of their functions from a remote location. Access to the home’s central PC may be gained via a local web server, giving Internet-based control from al...

Adequate security is a key requirement for home automation environments. Home Automation products are relatively new to the marketplace and many consumers are relatively unaware of the risks associated with home networks and remote management of these devices. Two key technologies involved in home networking and automation are Bluetooth and Jini. These technologies are littered with security ri...

The increasing usage of computer technology in our everyday life and especially in our homes and the increasing demand for sustainable life style concepts raise the question of how to combine these two trends. Can we make smart homes sustainable or sustainable homes smart? This paper discusses current trends and challenges arising with these questions and proposes a sustainable smart home appro...

In our society, we seem almost completely engaged in a variety of representational processes. By rendering events and processes “still”, they can be more easily manipulated and transferred into a stock of movable resources which can provide the possibility to control. It is in that context information technology can give us power. In this article it is argued that in order to understand informa...

Giovanni Pau 1,*, Mario Collotta 1, Antonio Ruano 2,3 and Jiahu Qin 4 1 Computers Engineering and Networks Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Kore University of Enna, Cittadella Universitaria, Enna 94100, Italy; [email protected] 2 Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Algarve, Campus de Gambelas, 8005-139 Faro, Portugal; [email protected] 3 IDMEC, Instituto Su...

Ambient Assisted Living aims at enhancing the quality of life of older and disabled people at home thanks to Smart Homes and Home Automation. However, many studies do not include tests in real settings, because data collection in this domain is very expensive and challenging and because of the few available data sets. The SWEET-HOME multimodal corpus is a dataset recorded in realistic condition...

Health monitoring and healthcare provisioning at home (i.e., outside the hospital) have received increasingly attention as a possible and partial solution for addressing the problems of an aging population. There are still many technological issues that need to be solved before home healthcare systems can be really cost-effective and efficient. However, in this paper we will highlight another c...