Smart environments link computers and other smart devices to everyday settings and tasks. Smart environments include

smart home Smart or SMART may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''Smart'' (Hey! Say! JUMP album), 2014 * Smart (Hotels.com), former mascot of Hotels.com * ''Smart'' (Sleeper album), 1995 debut album by Sleeper * ''SMart'', a children's television seri ...

smart cities A smart city is a technologically modern urban area that uses different types of electronic methods and sensors to collect specific data. Information gained from that data is used to manage assets, resources and services efficiently; in return ...

and

smart manufacturing Smart manufacturing is a broad category of manufacturing that employs computer-integrated manufacturing, high levels of adaptability and rapid design changes, digital information technology, and more flexible technical workforce training. Other g ...

Introduction

Smart environments are an extension of

pervasive computing Ubiquitous computing (or "ubicomp") is a concept in software engineering, hardware engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using ...

. According to

Mark Weiser Mark D. Weiser (July 23, 1952 – April 27, 1999) was a computer scientist and chief technology officer (CTO) at Xerox PARC. Weiser is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988. Within Silicon Valle ...

, pervasive computing promotes the idea of a world that is connected to sensors and computers. These sensors and computers are integrated with everyday objects in peoples' lives and are connected through networks.

Definition

Cook and Das define smart environment as "a small world where different kinds of

smart device A smart device is an electronic device, generally connected to other devices or networks via different wireless protocols (such as Bluetooth, Zigbee, near-field communication, Wi-Fi, LiFi, or 5G) that can operate to some extent interactively and ...

are continuously working to make inhabitants' lives more comfortable." Smart environments aim to satisfy the experience of individuals from every environment, by replacing the hazardous work, physical labor, and repetitive tasks with automated agents. Poslad differentiates three different kinds of smart environments for systems, services and devices: virtual (or distributed) computing environments, physical environments and human environments, or a hybrid combination of these: * ''Virtual computing environments'' enable smart devices to access pertinent services anywhere and anytime. * ''Physical environments'' may be embedded with a variety of smart devices of different types including tags, sensors and controllers and have different form factors ranging from nano- to micro- to macro-sized. * ''Human environments'': humans, either individually or collectively, inherently form a smart environment for devices. However, humans may themselves be accompanied by smart devices such as mobile phones, use surface-mounted devices (wearable computing) and contain embedded devices (e.g., pacemakers to maintain a healthy heart operation or AR contact lenses).

Features

Smart environments are broadly classified to have the following features # ''Remote control of devices'', like power line communication systems to control devices. # ''Device Communication'', using middleware, and Wireless communication to form a picture of connected environments. # ''Information Acquisition/Dissemination from sensor networks'' # ''Enhanced Services by Intelligent Devices'' # ''Predictive and Decision-Making capabilities''

Technologies

To build a smart environment, involves technologies of # Wireless communication # Algorithm design, signal prediction & classification, information theory # Multilayered software architecture,

Corba The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between sys ...

, middleware #

Speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...

# Image processing, image recognition # Sensors design, calibration,

motion detection Motion detection is the process of detecting a change in the position of an object relative to its surroundings or a change in the surroundings relative to an object. It can be achieved by either mechanical or electronic methods. When it is done by ...

, temperature, pressure sensors, accelerometers # Semantic Web and

knowledge graph The Google Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base from which Google serves relevant information in an infobox beside its search results. This allows the user to see the answer in a glance. The data is generated automatically from a variety of so ...

s # Adaptive control,

Kalman filter For statistics and control theory, Kalman filtering, also known as linear quadratic estimation (LQE), is an algorithm that uses a series of measurements observed over time, including statistical noise and other inaccuracies, and produces estimat ...

s # Computer networking # Parallel processing # Operating systems

Existing projects

The

Aware Home Research Initiative Awareness is the Mental state, state of being consciousness, conscious of something. More specifically, it is the ability to directly know and perception, perceive, to Feeling, feel, or to be cognizant of events. Another definition describes it as ...

at Georgia Tech "is devoted to the multidisciplinary exploration of emerging technologies and services based in the home" and was launched in 1998 as one of the first "living laboratories." The MavHome (Managing an Adaptive Versatile Home) project, at

UT Arlington The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA or UT Arlington) is a public research university in Arlington, Texas. The university was founded in 1895 and was in the Texas A&M University System for several decades until joining the University of Te ...

, is a smart environment-lab with state-of-the-art algorithms and protocols used to provide a customized, personal environment to the users of this space. The MavHome project, in addition to providing a safe environment, wants to reduce the energy consumption of the inhabitants. {{cite web , title = MavHome , year = 2004 , url = http://mavhome.uta.edu , url-status = dead , archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20050913211539/http://mavhome.uta.edu/ , archive-date = 2005-09-13 , df = Other projects include House_n at the MIT Media Lab and many others.

References