2009 Seventh Annual Communications Networks and Services Research Conference 2009 Seventh Annual Communication Networks and

Services Research Conference

Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks and RFID in a Smart Home Environment

Sajid Hussain, Scott Schaffner, Dyllon Moseychuck
Jodrey School of Computer Science, Acadia University Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Abstract
With the aging population and increased need to care for the elderly there are fewer of the younger generation to administer the necessary care and supervision. This condition is one of the reasons many researchers devote their time in evolving smart homes. These homes offer the occupant(s) a level of convenience not seen in traditional homes by using technology to create an environment that is aware of the activities taking place within it. The focus of this paper is on the integration of radio frequency identication (RFID) and wireless sensor network (WSN) in smart homes and applications of this system such as identifying a caregiver who enters the home. In the following work we present an architecture consisting of RFID, a WSN to identify motion within an environment and who is moving as well as several useful applications which take advantage of this information.

The following work is presented as follows; section 2 describes the primary motivation for our work. Section 3 will provide and overview of related work and section 4 presents an overview of the experiments we performed. Section 5 will propose applications to make use of our experiments. Sections 6 and 7 will present future work and closing remarks.

Motivation

While work has been done in the area of using WSNs and received signal strength indicator (RSSI) to track objects (occupants) [9] we have not found any current research on incorporating both WSN and RFID in the smart home environment for tracking and identifying. Smart home environments can provide custom behaviors for a given individual. However there may be people who interact with the environment who are not seeking any special function provided by the environment. RFID can be used to identify persons carrying an RFID tag whereas a WSN can use RSSI to simply identify the presence of an individual or group of individuals. Therefore, the integration of RFID and WSN can be used to identify 1) the presence of those who require special functions and/or identify the occupant with the environment and 2) presence of individuals who do not possess an RFID tag. And depending on the implementation of the system, treat these two different events accordingly. We submit that our approach provides a light-weight system that remains relatively invisible to the occupants while providing them with the necessary supervision. Implementations of such work can use the patterns derived by the WSN to determine dramatic changes in behavior. The use of RFID can provide a mechanism by which to identify key persons in order to make custom resources available to a specic person. Our system also has other applications which can be easily built on top of the existing architecture to add features and improve the usefulness of our smart environment. Section 5 describes these applications in greater detail.

Introduction

Research on smart homes began in the late 1980s with the intent on making homes more intelligent to alleviate the occupant(s) of daily tasks to handling emergency situations. By the mid 1990s the focus had turned to incorporating these innovations into the lives of the elderly. In Canada the elderly population had been increasing faster relative to the younger population and still does so today1 . As such, there has been a considerable amount of research devoted to this topic. This research on smart homes is now starting to make its way into the market. While it takes a considerable amount of work and planning to create a smart home, there are many examples of products currently on the market which can perform individual functions that are considered to be part of a smart home. In this paper we integrate RFID and WSN to create a system capable of not only identifying the arrival of an occupant but determining who the occupant is. The motivation for such a work will be described in the following section and after this discussion we propose several applications for such a system.
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Related Work

Source: http : //lysander.sourceoecd.org

Many works have been done in the area of smart homes. Some of the problems researched include estimating where
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978-0-7695-3649-1/09 $25.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/CNSR.2009.32

an occupant will move in the environment given a pattern of movements previously observed[9]. Bodhuin et. al [1] describes the relationship between the virtual and physical aspects of a smart environment and provides a software architecture for such an environment. The work by Hu et. al [6] integrates WSN with RFID directly by using WSN motes with built in RFID readers. This WSN is then used to measure drug intake of users in the smart environment and reliably transfer ECG data. Other works of interest address the issue of target localization using wireless sensor networks machine learning techniques [3]. This work presents but one of potentially many alternatives to object tracking. One issue which we do not specically address but works have been done in the area is how to best architect the environment such that the design maximizes availability. The work presented by Lin et. al [8] discusses how to maximize quality of service (QoS). Another work related to smart homes is focused on architecting access points. The work presented by Lee et. al [7] presents a methodology by which to design access points in such a way as to ensure network efciency using genetic algorithms. In the smart home environment there may be any number of intelligent artifacts, many of which operate wirelessly. In their work, Lee et. al present a genetic algorithmic approach to solving this problem. There have been numerous previous works which focus on RFID for location [2, 10]. These works generally rely on the RSSI value coming from the RFID tag. These are but a few works that are at the very least somewhat related to the work we present here. While these works are not directly related they all have applications in the work we present. At this point we have not found any work that seeks to solve the problem presented in this work using the methods we describe.

WSN and RFID. The environment the experiments took place in (see Figure 1) included a number of pieces of furniture including ling cabinets, desks, chairs and a book shelf. Our experiments involved two motes, both of which were positioned on the outside of the door frame of the room. Two RFID readers each equipped with an internal and an external RFID antenna were arranged around the perimeter of the room. This architecture is intended to be light-weight and scalable while still providing the necessary services to caregivers and occupants. This architecture consists of two parts, each of which will be described in detail in the following sections; the WSN and the RFID reader. 4.1 Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are networks made up of relatively low power motes which are connected wirelessly. There have been large amounts of research done on many different aspects of WSN sensor placement [4], security [5] and many other aspects of WSNs. Our experiments deal with the Radio Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) of WSNs. RSSI is a measurement of how strong a signal appears to the mote that is receiving the signal. The RSSI can be affected by many factors that can cause it to change quickly. Our experiments look at the sudden changes that occur in RSSI when an object moves between two nodes. The mote we used in our experiments is the T-mote Sky. This mote is a relatively cheap, general purpose mote. The T-mote Sky is ideal for our experiments because it is relatively inexpensive and we did not require any of the extra features that the more expensive motes have.

4 Experiments

Figure 2: Our RSSI experiment with the door open Our rst experiment with the WSN was to place motes on the outside of the door frame and walk through the door while gathering RSSI data and sending it to a base station mote. The door was open for the experiment and our test data shows that the door was reecting the signal back to

Figure 1: The environment for our experiments All of the experiments took place in a controlled lab environment in order to determine the usefulness of integrating

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one of the motes thus causing considerable noise. Figure 2 illustrates this noisy data that one of the two motes gathered during the experiment.

tags we used are the Alien Technology ALN-9534 tags. The RFID readers were connected over Ethernet to a computer running a Java program which gathered the lists of tags that each reader could see and every 2 seconds the program reported which tags it has seen within the last 3 seconds.

Figure 3: Our RSSI experiment with the door closed Our next experiment was similar to the rst, except we kept the door closed. RFID data was also gathered during this experiment, which will be shown below. Figure 3 shows that with the door closed, the RSSI noise that was visible before is now absent from our data. Figure 3 also shows variations in RSSI readings as a person walks in and out of the room. In both experiments a Java program listened over the serial port for incoming transmissions from the base station; the mote directly connected to the computer by a USB port. The software gathered the RSSI readings sent by the motes and stored them in a at le. Later this data was used to create the patterns shown in gures 1 and 2. The key observation we drew from these two experiments was that even in the presence of such a large amount of noise we were still able to observe a denite pattern as a person walked between the two nodes. Future works may address the issue of noise to provide cleaner readings or a system that can adapt to the presence of noise, however since the output did exhibit a pattern that conrmed the presence of a person this particular issue was left for future endeavors. 4.2 Radio Frequency Identication

Figure 4: Our RFID data recorded at the same time as our RSSI experiment with the door closed. We propose in our applications below that RFID should be used to determine who it is that is in the area. In our experiment we only track the presence of a single tag, although there are other tags present in the environment. Figure 4 shows the data from our experiment with RFID tags which was recorded at the same time as our data in gure 3. The transitions in gure 4 of the tag leaving or entering the environment occur at roughly the same time as the WSN notices that somebody is going through the door in gure 3. In our experiment we track the presence of an RFID tag in a single room, however as a future work we could place RFID readers in different rooms to test whether or not we can determine which room a tag is in based on which reader can see the tag.

Applications

Radio frequency identication is a technology used for identifying persons who carry identication badges (or tags). This technology consists of readers which reads an approaching tag to identify the person who is carrying the tag. Here we assume that one tag uniquely identies a carrier. Tags do not require a power source of their own. They get the energy they require from a nearby reader which they then use to transmit their designation to the reader. Each tag holds 96 bits which uniquely identies the tag with the network. In our experiments we used two Alien Technology ALR9650 RFID readers, each with an external antenna. The

The combined use of both Wireless Sensor Networks and RFID can be applied in useful ways within the environment of a smart home. Described below are several of the applications which we propose for the combined use of WSNs and RFID. 5.1 Identication and Movement Tracking Firstly, we make a couple assumptions about the WSN Assumption 5.1 The topology is known and is xed. Assumption 5.2 To simplify this architecture we assume each node has innite power. Once deployed the sensors will send packets consisting of the senders ID to each sensor within its range. The receiving sensor will then create another packet consisting of the original senders ID, the RSSI signal strength and the link quality indicator (LQI) and send that packet to the BS.

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By keeping track of RSSI changes we can determine, using our knowledge of the network topology, when someone moves between two of our nodes and where in our smart home they are moving. WSNs allow us to tell where people are moving but in addition to this information we can use RFID to determine who is moving around. If our smart home is also covered by a series of RFID readers, we can determine the identity of anyone carrying an RFID tag that the network recognizes as belonging to that person. This system is vulnerable to an attack where an intruder steals someones tag and pretends to be that person. In the future we plan on applying machine learning to model user activity and possibly use this information to recognize an intruder. 5.2 Caregiver Identication

of the user with the highest priority. Songs that are on both users playlists could be sent to the front of the queue so that they would play next.

Future Work

We propose to use an Alien RFID reader to identify caregivers as they enter and exit the environment. For simplicity we limit the environment to one entry point which also serves as the exit point. The RFID reader is placed at this point and when a tag comes within range it will detect the tag and log the event to the central system that also serves as the base station for the WSN. 5.3 Lighting

The goal of our next work is to investigate machine learning techniques that may be incorporated to the architecture presented in this work. By incorporating machine learning with our work here we hope to develop a system that is capable of identifying occupants of the environment based on models the system builds. In doing this we remove the need for occupants to be constantly carrying an RFID badge. Furthermore, in the case of the elderly such a modeling system will be able to identify uncharacteristic behavior. Such abnormalities could indicate that the elderly occupant is harmed in some way. In the case of the smart home, the home itself will be capable of identifying such changes and alert the appropriate authorities. In addition to this we also can extend this work to make better use of RFID. When a caregiver enters the environment with an RFID badge the system can identify the person and make available the resources necessary for that caregiver to carry out his/her duty. Consider the case where a monitor is near the entrance and a physician were to enter the environment. The environment would identify the physician and present the physician with the relevant information on the monitor.

An obvious application of knowing when someone enters and exits a room is to turn lights on when someone enters and turn them off when they exit. Because you also know who is in the room, you could use custom lighting levels for different users. Users would also have to be given priority so that if more than one user is in a room, the lighting level used is that of the user with the highest priority. An alternative method to using priorities is to use the average lighting level of the users in the room. This lighting system would only act for users with RFID tags because the WSN we used was unable to tell the difference between a person entering the room and a person exiting the room. This system would still require regular light switches, not only for users without RFID tags, but also for if a user with an RFID tag wants to turn the lights off. 5.4 Personalized Music

Conclusion

As smart homes become more and more common, people will design their homes to be smart even before they are built. While using wireless motes which rely on having the batteries periodically changed may not be the best solution in these homes, the concept of changing RSSI levels as someone passes between motes will certainly still apply. With homes that are built smart from the ground up, it will be interesting to see what other sensors can be used in interesting ways to make a smart home. Smart homes that rely heavily on radio signals would have to use construction materials that are more transparent to radio signals for walls and doors in order to reduce noise. You could have pressure sensors in the oor to tell exactly where someone is standing, or even a sensor in a pot that can decide if it is about to boil over and tell the stove to reduce the temperature. With RFID, smart homes could have tags embedded in nearly every item in the house. Furniture, dishes, even clothing could have RFID tags embedded into them. Our experiment assumed that the tags were only carried by people, but if every object in the house has one then the number of possible applications of our system increases dramatically. In this situation, RFID could help you locate misplaced items, or let you keep track of what your pet is doing while you are away.

As an extension of our previous example of controlling lights as a person enters and exits rooms, we are also proposing that music could be controlled in a similar fashion. The music would turn on as a user enters the smart home, and as the user moves from room to room, the music would move into the next room without pausing. Each user could have their own personalized playlists, so that one user could have their favorite songs playing while another user could have different songs. Like our previous lighting example, this would also use priorities. If multiple users are in the same room, the system would play the songs

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When WSN and RFID are combined, they can be used to create a system that is ideal for deployment in a smart home. With our system, there are many possible applications that can be implemented in software with little or no hardware changes. The system is not limited to the applications discussed in this paper. There could be applications aimed at assisting people with specic disabilities that could be implemented in the homes of those people.

References
[1] Thierry Bodhuin, Gerardo Canfora, Rosa Preziosia, and Maria Tortorella. Hiding complexity and heterogeneity of the physical world in smart living environments. SAC06, 2006. [2] J. Britton. An investigation into the feasibility of locating portable medical devices using radio frequency identication devices and technology. Journal of Medical Engineering & Technology, 2007. [3] Wen-Hua Ju David Madigan. Location estimation in wireless networks: A bayesian approach. Unknown, 2005. [4] S.S. Dhillon and K. Chakrabarty. Sensor placement for effective coverage and surveillance in distributed sensor networks, 2003. [5] Wenliang Du, Jing Deng, Yunghsiang S. Han, and Paramod K. Vershney. A key pre-distribution scheme for sensor networks using deployment knowledge. INFOCOM 2004. Twenty-third AnnualJoint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies, 1:572597, 11 2004. [6] Fei Hu, Laura Celentano, and Yang Xiao. Errorresistant rd-assisted wireless sensor networks for cardiac telehealthcare. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2008. [7] Jong-Hyouk Lee. Optimizing access point allocation using genetic algorithmic approach for smart home environments. The Computer Journal Advance Access, 2008. [8] Chi-Yi Lin. Increasing service availability in a wireless home network environment. The Computer Journal Advance Access, 2008. [9] Jitae Shin Navrati Saxena, Abhishek Roy. Nearoptimal tracking for residents comfort in contextaware heterogeneous smart environments. The Computer Journal Advance Access, 2008. [10] Ti Ng Zhang, Zhenyong Chen, Yuanxi N Ouyang, Ji Uyue Hao, and Zhang Xi Ong. An improved rdbased locating algorithm by eliminating diversity of active tags for indoor environment. The Computer Journal, 2008.

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