Chapter 6
Smart Home, Smart Office
The smart intelligent devices are finding their way into our homes and into all other spaces to help us to interact with such spaces for a healthier, less wasteful and more comfortable lifestyle. It is exciting to see so much effort being put into this area through smart environment projects coming under various terms such as smart house, smart office or ambient intelligence. There are incredible efforts in various societies providing more intelligent houses able to handle a large number of new smart services enabling better utilisation of basic resources like water and electric energy and also helping to increase the quality of life for people of all ages. The main debate, however, is to design new houses or to provide old houses with new technology so that the owner of the house can automate services to make better use of power consumption by means of a collaborative smart grid of electric devices with coordination between them in order to reduce the amount of energy invested. Houses in which an important part of the power comes directly from the house by means of solar or wind energy fostering environmental-aware resource reutilisation would play a more significant role. In this context, the usage of distributed sensing platforms for in-home or in-office applications become of great interest mostly due to their intrinsic nature of sensing data associated with a wider range of application scenarios.
With the recent move towards smart space ...
