Y. BALA KRISHNA* et al.

[IJESAT] INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING SCIENCE & ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

ISSN: 22503676
Volume-2, Special Issue-1, 117 122

ZIGBEE BASED WIRELESS HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM WITH VOICE RECOGNITION

Y. Bala Krishna1, S. Nagendram 2, B. Naresh Kumar Reddy 3
2

Research Scholar, Dept. of Electronics & Computer Engineering, K.L. University, A.P, balakrish.klu@gmail.com Assistant Professor, Dept. of Electronics & Computer Engineering, K.L. University, A.P, India, reena1286@gmail.com 3 Research Scholar, Dept. of Electronics & Computer Engineering, K.L. University, A.P,naresh.klu@gmail.com

Abstract
This paper details the overall design of a wireless home automation system (WHAS). This is fuelled by the need to provide supporting systems for the elderly and the disabled, especially those who live alone. The automation centres on recognition of voice commands and uses low-power RF ZigBee wireless communication modules which are relatively cheap. The home automation system is intended to control all lights and electrical appliances in a home or office using voice commands. The zigbee can receive the voice and send the voice data to the ARM9 controller and then the controller converts the voice into required format and then again send the data through the zigbee to the another zigbee and to the micro controller where the devices are attached to it. Based on the message it received it either turns ON/OFF the devices.

Index Terms: Home automation, ZigBee transceivers, voice Streaming, ADC, Differential Pulse Code Modulation (DPCM), Voice recognition. --------------------------------------------------------------------- *** -----------------------------------------------------------------------1. INTRODUCTION
The demography of the world population shows a trend that the elderly population worldwide is increasing rapidly as a result of the increase of the average live expectancy of people [1]. Caring for and supporting this growing population is a concern for governments and nations around the globe. Home automation is one of the major growing industries that can change the way people live. Some of these home automation systems target those seeking luxury and sophisticated home automation platforms; others target those with special needs like the elderly and the disabled. The aim of the reported Wireless Home Automation System (WHAS) is to provide those with special needs with a system that can respond to voice commands and control the on/off status of electrical devices, such as lamps, fans, television etc, in the home. The system should be reasonably cheap, easy to configure, and easy to run. There have been several commercial and research projects on smart homes and voice recognition systems. Many new communication technologies such as GSM/GPRS networks, wireless sensor networks, Bluetooth, power line carriers and the Internet have been applied to home automation. For example, wireless sensor networks based on ZigBee protocol is widely used in smart homes and it has become the focus in this field. It consists of comfort and home automation, security and safety at home, ambient assistance (intelligence) and remote health monitoring. Guangming Song (Etc) [2] Developed a wireless-controllable power outlet system.

Figure 1: uControl Home Security, Monitoring and Automation (SMA) [3]. There have been several commercial and research projects on smart homes and voice recognition systems. Figure 1 shows

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Y. BALA KRISHNA* et al. [IJESAT] INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING SCIENCE & ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY an integrated platform for home security, monitoring and automation (SMA) from uControl [3]. The system is a 7-inch touch screen that can wirelessly be connected to security alarms and other home appliances. The home automation through this system requires holding and interacting with a large panel which constraints the physical movements of the user [4]. Another popular commercially available system for home automation is from Home Automated Living (HAL) [5]. HAL software taps the power of an existing PC to control the home. It provides speech command interface. A big advantage of this system is it can send commands all over the house using the existing highway of electrical wires inside the homes walls. No new wires means HAL is easy and inexpensive to install. However, most of these products sold in the market are heavily priced and often require significant home make over.

ISSN: 22503676
Volume-2, Special Issue-1, 117 122

packets of binary data. At the receiving end (Central Controller Module), binary data are converted to analogue, filtered and passed to the computer through the sound card. A Visual Basic application program, running on the PC, uses Microsoft Speech API library for the voice recognition. Upon recognition of the commands, control characters are sent wirelessly to the specified appliance address. Consequently, appliances can be turned ON or OFF depending on the control characters received.

3. HARDWARE DESIGN
In this section we present the hardware descriptions of the three modules that constitute the WHAS.

3.1 Handheld Microphone Module (MM)

2. SYSTEM OVERVIEW
The Wireless Home Automation System (WHAS) is an integrated system to facilitate elderly and disabled people with an easy-to-use home automation system that can be fully operated based on speech commands. The system is constructed in a way that is easy to install, configure, run, and maintain. Figure 3: Block diagram of the handheld Microphone Module. The components of the microphone module are shown in Figure 3. The system captures human voice using a sampling rate (fs) of 8 kHz. It is known that the highest frequency component of the human voice is 20 kHz, however the most significant parts of the information is encoded in frequencies between 6 Hz and 3.5 kHz [6]. To meet Nyquist sampling criteria, an anti-aliasing filter is used to block all the frequencies above the Nyquist frequency (Fn).

3.2 Central Controller Module

The functional blocks of the central controller module are shown in Figure 4. At the central controller module (coordinator), when data are received, the received bytes are decompressed using DPCM algorithm [7]. Decompressed data is assigned to the digital-to-analogue converter (DAC). The analogue output of the DAC is filtered and fed to the computer as analogue signal through the sound card of the PC.

Figure 2: Functional block diagram of the Wireless Home Automation System (WHAS). Legends- A: Analogue, D: Digital Figure 2 illustrates the sequence of activities in the WHAS. The voice is captured using a microphone, sampled, filtered and converted to digital data using an analogue-to-digital converter. The data is then compressed and sent serially as

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Y. BALA KRISHNA* et al. [IJESAT] INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING SCIENCE & ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

ISSN: 22503676
Volume-2, Special Issue-1, 117 122

4. SOFTWARE DESIGN
Software design includes ADC sampling and compression/decompression algorithms, transmission and receiving, and voice recognition.

4.1 ADC sampling and data compression / decompression

Figure 4: Block diagram of the Central Controller Module. The portable microphone module implements DPCM compression scheme. This compression algorithm is inherently lossy because of the error incurred due to the nature of the compression algorithm. The algorithm compresses each ADC sample from 12 bits of data down to 6-bit codes. This code represents the difference between the actual sample and the predicted value of the sample. The predicted sample is obtained from the previous iteration result. The difference between the sample and the predicted value is then quantised. The 6 bit code is then packed into bytes of data in order to send them serially. In order to calculate the new predicted value, the compression algorithm decodes the difference and adds it into the current predicted value.

3.3 Appliance Control Module

Once the speech commands are recognised, control charterers are sent to the specified appliance address through ZigBee communication protocol. Each appliance that has to be controlled has a relay controlling circuit. The speech recognition system uses a single-chip solution for voice recognition. LD3320 is a voice chip for speech recognition based on SI-ASR (speaker-independent automatic speech recognition) technology. LD3320 has a highly effective speaker-independent speech recognition search engine module and a complete speaker-independent speech recognition feature library inside. It is designed with hardware optimization and acceleration for speech recognition, without any external auxiliary devices such as Flash, RAM, etc. It can complete speech recognition at an accuracy rate of 95%, not even requiring users to do their own voice training to generate speech features for training library. So the cost of voice recognition module is lower than SUNPLUS SPCE061A in [8].

Figure 6: DPCM Compression algorithm.

Figure 5. Speech recognition process Figure 7: DPCM Decompression Algorithm. The speech recognition process of LD3320 is shown as Figure 5. It first analyses the spectrum of the voice input by MIC and then extracts the voice features. After that, its compared with words in the list of key words. Finally, the key word with the highest score is output as the recognition result. Figure 6 shows the DPCM compression algorithm. At the receiving end, data are decompressed to the original form using the DPCM decompression algorithm. Figure 7 shows the

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Y. BALA KRISHNA* et al. [IJESAT] INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING SCIENCE & ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY decoding algorithm which basically matches the received code with the quantised difference and adds this difference to the predictor [9].

ISSN: 22503676
Volume-2, Special Issue-1, 117 122

4.2 Voice Recognition Application

The voice recognition application implements Microsoft speech API. The application compares incoming speech with an obtainable predefined dictionary. The Microsoft speech API run time environment relies on two main engines: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR engine) and Text To Speech (TTS engine) as shown in Figure 8. ASR implements the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to compute the spectrum of the fingerprint data [4]. Comparing the fingerprint with an existing database returns a string of the text being spoken. This string is represented by a control character that gets sent to the corresponding appliances address. The designed graphical user interface (GUI) offers the user the choice of selecting the desired serial communication port as well as it provides a record of all the commands that have been recognised and executed. The application implements the hierarchy described earlier in Figure 8 and the flow chart shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9: Flow chart of the voice recognition application. When designing the programme GUI, making it a user friendly application was a huge priority since the target clients need to avoid any possible complications in the system. Control characters corresponding to the recognised commands are then sent serially from the central controller module to the appliance control modules that are connected to the home appliances.

4.3 ZigBee RF communication

Figure 8: Voice recognition application hierarchy. Zigbee protocol is the communication protocol thats used in this system. Zigbee offers 250 kbps as maximum baud rate, however, 115200 bps was used for sending and receiving as this was the highest speed that the UART of the microcontroller could be programmed to operate at. ZigBee is a radio frequency (RF) communications standard based on IEEE 802.15.4. Figure 2 depicts the general architecture of a Zigbee based home automation network [10]. The Zigbee coordinator is responsible for creating and maintaining the network. Each electronic device (i.e. Washing Machine, Television, Lamp etc) in the system is a Zigbee device managed by the coordinator. All communication between

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Y. BALA KRISHNA* et al. [IJESAT] INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING SCIENCE & ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY devices propagates through the coordinator to the destination device. The wireless nature of ZigBee helps overcome the intrusive installation problem with the existing home automation systems identified earlier. The ZigBee standard theoretically provides 250kbps data rate, and as 40kbps can meet the requirements of most control systems, it is sufficient for controlling most home automation devices [11]. The low installation and running cost offered by ZigBee helps tackle the expensive and complex architecture problems with existing home automation systems, as identified earlier.

ISSN: 22503676
Volume-2, Special Issue-1, 117 122

REFERENCES
[1] T. Birtley, (2010) Japan debates care for elderly. [Cited 21/09/2010]. Available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0UTqfigSec [2] Guangming Song, Fei Ding, Weijuan Zhang and Aiguo Song, A Wireless Power Outlet System for Smart Homes, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 54, No. 4, NOVEMBER 2008 [3](2010) uControl Home security system website. [Cited 201014thOct].Available: http://www.itechnews.net/2008/05/20/ucontrol-home-securitysystem/ [4] R. Gadalla, Voice Recognition System for Massey University Smart house, M. Eng thesis, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand, 2006. [5] (2010) Home Automated Living website. [Cited 2010 14th Oct].Available: http://www.homeautomatedliving.com/default.htm [6] L. R. Rabiner and R. W. Schafer, Digital Processing of Speech Signals, New Jersey, US: Prentice Hall Inc, 2001 [7] B. Yukesekkaya, A. A. Kayalar, M. B. Tosun, M. K. Ozcan, and A. Z. Alkar, A GSM, Internet and Speech Controlled WirelessInteractive Home Automation System, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, vol. 52, pp. 837843, August 2006. [8] Jinn-Kwei Guo, Chun-Lin Lu, Ju-Yun Chang, Yi-Jing Li,Ya-Chi Huang, Fu-Jiun Lu and Ching-Wen Hsu, Interactive Voice-Controller Applied to Home Automation, 2009 Fifth International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing [9] Voice Recoder Reference Design (AN 278), Silicon Laboratories, 2006. [10] Guangming Song, Fei Ding, Weijuan Zhang and Aiguo Song, A Wireless Power Outlet System for Smart Homes, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 54, No. 4, NOVEMBER 2008 [11] Il-Kyu Hwang Dae-Sung Lee Jin-Wook Baek Home Network Configuring Scheme for All Electric Appliances Using ZigBee-based Integrated Remote Controller, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol.55, No.3, AUGUST2009

5. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

In this paper, we proposed a voice control system for zigbeebased home automation networks. In outwork, SI-ASR (Speaker-Independent Automatic Speech Recognition) has been used; making it requires no training of recording. This speech recognition control system uses human-computer interaction to realize multiple menus choose function. A home automation system based on voice recognition was built and implemented. The system is targeted at elderly and disabled people. The prototype developed can control electrical devices in a home or office. The system implements Automatic Speech Recognition engines through Microsoft speech APIs. The system implements the wireless network using ZigBee RF modules for their efficiency and low power consumption. Multimedia streaming through the network was implemented with the help of the Differential Pulse Code Modulation (DPCM) compression algorithms that allows to compress the speech data to half of its original data size. The preliminary test results are promising.
Future work will entail:

Adding confirmation commands to the voice recognition system. Integrating variable control functions to improve the system versatility such as providing control commands other than ON/OFF commands. For example Increase Temperature, Dim Lights etc. Integration of GSM or mobile server to operate from a distance. Design and integration of an online home control panel.

AKNOWLEDGEMENT
We thank to our principal, Prof. K. Raja Shekar Rao, for providing necessary facilities towards carrying out this work. We acknowledge the diligent efforts of our Head of the Department Dr.S.Balaji in assisting us towards implementation of this idea.

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Y. BALA KRISHNA* et al. [IJESAT] INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING SCIENCE & ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

ISSN: 22503676
Volume-2, Special Issue-1, 117 122

BIOGRAPHIES
Y. Bala Krishna, presently doing an M.Tech in Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering in Koneru Lakshmaiah University.

S.Nagendram, presently working in K.L.University as an Asst. Professor in Electronics and Computer Engineering Department.

B. Naresh Kumar Reddy, presently doing an M.Tech in Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering in Koneru Lakshmaiah University.

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