Multi-Functional Smart Home Automation System

Current availability of interactive technologies infrastructure such as internet bandwidth, increased processing
power and connectivity through mobile devices at affordable
costs have led to new concepts related to human living. Smart
cities, smart life and internet of things etc. are few such evolving
research domains. A prominent concept among these is ‘Smart
Home’, which involves automation and interactive technologies.
This paper proposes a multi-functional ‘Smart Home Automation
System’ (SHAS), where users can use voice-commands to control
their home-appliances and gadgets, for different functionalities
and purposes. The proposed system can be adapted to a user’s
voice and recognise the voice-commands, independent of the
speaker’s personal characteristics such as accent. The system is
aimed to be cost-effective, flexible and robust. The voice command
recognition is achieved using a dedicated hardware module and
an Arduino micro-controller board for commands processing and
control. Performance evaluation is carried out by developing a
multi-functional miniature prototype of the SHAS. Results of the
experiments conducted are quite promising. The prototype SHAS
can be used for converting existing homes into smart homes at
relatively low cost and with convenience.
Keywords: smart home automation system, voice-command
recognition, multi-functions, multi-sensor, voice-command
I. INTRODUCTION
A smart home is a home that provides its residents the comfort, convenience and ease of operation of devices at all times,
irrespective of where the resident actually is within the house.
A smart home usually consists of electrical appliances such as
lighting, fans, air-conditioners, room-heaters, air-coolers and
microwave oven etc.; and electronic gadgets such as television,
computers, audio systems, laptops, music-systems and mobile
devices etc. All these appliances and gadgets can be connected
and controlled remotely, over a secure channel using WiFi or internet through software application, from within or
outside the house. A smart home consists of three elements:
(i) internal home network, (ii) intelligent control and (iii)
home automation with wired/wireless access gateways. These
systems and devices within a home can also be managed either
from inside home, or can be linked to services and systems
from outside the home [1].
These appliances and gadgets are generally connected to
specific sensors, so as to make these automatically adapted
to certain situations and in-turn make the occupants feel
comfortable. An adaptive smart home would be the one that