Exploring the Predictability of Temperatures in a Scaled Model of a Smarthome.

In modern smarthomes, temperature regulation is achieved through a mix of traditional and emergent technologies including air conditioning, heating, intelligent utilization of the effects of sun, wind, and shade as well as using stored heat and cold. To achieve the desired comfort for the inhabitants while minimizing environmental impact and cost, the home controller must predict how its actions will impact the temperature and other environmental factors in various parts of the home. The question we are investigating in this paper is whether the temperature values in different rooms in a home are predictable based on readings from sensors in the home. We are also interested in whether increased accuracy can be achieved by adding sensors to capture the state of doors and windows of the given room and/or the whole home, and what type of machine learning algorithms can take advantage of the additional information. As experimentation on real-world homes is highly expensive, we use ScaledHome, a 1:12 scale, IoT-enabled model of a smart home for data acquisition. Our experiments show that while additional data can improve the accuracy of the prediction, the type of machine learning models needs to be carefully adapted to the number of data features available.

A Smart Walker for People with Both Visual and Mobility Impairment.

In recent years, significant work has been done in technological enhancements for mobility aids (smart walkers). However, most of this work does not cover the millions of people who have both mobility and visual impairments. In this paper, we design and study four different configurations of smart walkers that are specifically targeted to the needs of this population. We investigated different sensing technologies (ultrasound-based, infrared depth cameras and RGB cameras with advanced computer vision processing), software configurations, and user interface modalities (haptic and audio signal based). Our experiments show that there are several engineering choices that can be used in the design of such assistive devices. Furthermore, we found that a holistic evaluation of the end-to-end performance of the systems is necessary, as the quality of the user interface often has a larger impact on the overall performance than increases in the sensing accuracy beyond a certain point.