A MOBILE AND SPEECH CONTROLLED WIRELESS HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM

Baris Yuksekkaya, Ali Alper Kayalar, Mehmet Bilgehan Tosun, and Murat Kaan Ozcan, Member, IEEE

Abstract — The approach to home automation system design is almost standardized nowadays. In this paper, we tried to increase these standards by combining new design techniques to home automation systems. These techniques include controlling the house by means of internet, GSM cellular communication network and also human voice. Our design integrates all these methods within a single system in which the user can change the way he/she controls the whole system anytime. Our system offers a powerful but yet a user-friendly way of real-time monitoring and remote controlling of the house.

 

Index Terms — Home automation, speech recognition, cell phone, internet, real-time monitoring and remote controlling, RF Communication.

 

I. INTRODUCTION

 

Home automation systems are a result of an attempt to enhance the standards of living around and inside the house and were made possible by the breakthrough in the area of integrated circuits and microprocessors. These systems provide the consumers with increased security and safety, economic benefit through energy control, and convenience by giving them control over every piece of domestic electrical equipment in the house. [1]

Designing a home automation system for monitoring and controlling various devices in remote locations can be done through a variety of communications options such as wireless LAN technologies, dial-up modems, private radio networks, satellite communication, internet, cellular network and so on. Different studies on home automation work on different types of these controlling methods.

In our model we proposed three remote controlling methods which are via 1-)  GSM Network  2-) World Wide Web  3-) Speech . The first two of these methods are for the users when they are outside the house whereas the third one is for the users when they are inside the house.

Turkey is a rapidly developing country in terms of technology and nearly everyone has a personal mobile phone. Since the first step of the home automation is real-time monitoring of the status changes of the devices that we control in the house, the system that we design should have the capability of warning the users no matter where they are right

at the time at which the changes occur. Thus, our main objective for using GSM(Global System for Mobile Communication) network for the communication between the home and the users(and vice versa) is its wide spread coverage which makes the whole system online for almost all the time.[2] Other advantages of using GSM systems in home automation are its low cost compared to other mobile communication methods (such as satellite communication) , and  that it has a very high security infrastructure so the information we sent or receive can not be reached by an outsider. Although using GSM network has all these important advantages over other communication methods, it would be a tedious, time and money consuming work for the user to use his mobile phone each time he needs to communicate with the system when we think of the indoor life. To make indoor-communication (which means the communication with the system when the user is in the house) easier we suggested another method which uses the voice of the user’s own to control the whole system. By using the relevant software and hardware, which will be briefly explained later on this paper, in our model of home automation system, the user can interact with the system by giving the commands via his/her speech. This method provides us savings on both time and money, and greatly simplifies the procedure when the user is at home.

II. SYSTEM OVERVIEW

 

The system is modeled with three different parts in Fig. 1.

 

Figure 1 – Block diagram of overall system

 

III. COMMUNICATION METHODS

 

A. World Wide Web

 

B. GSM Network

 

 C. Speech

 

IV. SYSTEM ELEMENTS

 

A. PC

 

 

                                                                                                                    

Figure 2 – The login page created by ASP                                                     Figure 3 – The interface menu

 

 

Figure 4 – Main control program created by C#

 

 

Figure 5 – Settings part of main control program

 

Figure 6 – Transceiving node implementation

 

C. Appliance Nodes

 

Figure 7 - Main door lock implementation

 

 

Figure 8 – Temperature sensor implementation

 

 

 

V. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

 

This document presentes a speech and mobile controlled and user friendly approach to the available home automation systems. It is real-time monitorable and remote controllable which simplifies the users’ indoor life and their interaction with home. This system can easily be implemented because of its innecessity to wiring between the appliances since it uses wireless communication standards.[7]  Another enhancement of the system is its high security. PC controls every data bit by bit which results in preventing the disorder between different home appliances.

Up to now, firstly we have researched the literatures for all the topics that include home automation design and wireless networks. Afterwards, we have built the main control program, web (home) server, a user friendly web page (still being constructed), the warning system via GSM network (with SMS), started to establish the RF communication among the appliances, analyzed all the speech recognition algorithms[3, 8, 9, 10, 11] and chosen the most appropriate ones (Baum-Welch for training part and Viterbi for recognition part) for our speech recognition engine. We have also started to implement these algorithms. All the necessary hardware is designed and half of it is already implemented.

In the near future, we will try to fully implement the speech recognition software, build the motion sensor node and integrate a camera with the main control program for higher security in the house. We will also implement a user friendly interface on the mobile phone which will enable the user to communicate with the automation system.

 

REFERENCES

 

  1. C. Douligeris, J. Khawand, C. Khawand, “Communications and Control for a Home Automation System”
  2. A. Alheraish ; “Design and Implementation of Home Automation System”
  3. L. Rabiner, “A tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and selected applications in speech recognition” Proc. IEEE, vol. 77, pp. 257-286, Feb.1989
  4. Magdi A. Mohamed, Paul Gader, “Generalized Hidden Markov Models” , IEEE , Transactions on Fuzzy systems, vol. 8, no. 1, Feb. 2000
  5. Lawrence Rabiner, Biing-Hwang Juang “Fundamentals of speech recognition”
  6. Ali Ziya Alkar and Umit Buhur;  “An Internet Based Wireless Home Automation System for Multifunctional Devices” , IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 51, No. 4, NOVEMBER 2005
  7. A. R. Al-Ali and M. AL-Rousan , “Java-Based Home Automation System” , IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 50, No. 2, MAY 2004
  8. Pedro J. Moreno, Bhiksha Raj, Richard M. Stern, “Data-driven environmental compensation for speech recognition: A unified approach”
  9. Xin-yi Zhang, Jin-pei Wu, Qi-shan Zhang, “An improved speech recognition algorithm based on difference subspace”
  10. Kenan Carki, Petra Geutner, Tanja Schultz, “Turkish Lvcsr: Towards Better Speech Recognition For Agglutinative Languages “
  11. L. Gillick,  S.J. Coz, “Some Statistical Issues In The Comparison Of Speech Recognition Algorithms”

 

 

 

Metin Kutusu:   Baris Yuksekkaya is a senior B.S. student in Electrical & Electronics Engineering Department, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. Completed his high school education in Birikim High School, Sanliurfa, Turkey in 2002. His main interests are signal processing, telecommunication systems and high-level language programming. He has experiences in speech recognition algorithms, and MATLAB. He is a member of  IEEE and secretary of the  IEEE student branch of Hacettepe University.

 

 

 

 

Metin Kutusu:   Ali Alper Kayalar is a senior B.S. student in Electrical & Electronics Engineering Department, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. Completed his high school education in Yenimahalle Ataturk Anatolian High School, Ankara, Turkey in 2002. His main interests are high-level language programming, embedded system design, and automation. He has experiences in ABAP programming language in SAP Platform. He is a member of  IEEE and chair of the  IEEE student branch of Hacettepe University.

 

 

 

 

Metin Kutusu:   Mehmet Bilgehan Tosun is a senior B.S. student in Electrical & Electronics Engineering Department, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. He is graduated from Ataturk High School in Ankara, Turkey (in 2002). He is mainly working on robotics and hardware designing & implementation. He is a member of IEEE and treasurer of the  IEEE student branch of Hacettepe University.

 

 

 

 

Metin Kutusu:   Murat Kaan Ozcan is graduated from Cankaya Milli Piyango Anatolian High School, Ankara, Turkey, in 2002. He is currently a senior B.S. student in Electrical & Electronics Engineering Department, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. He has several work experiences in different companies. He is mainly interested in wireless communication technologies and GSM network. He is a member of IEEE Communications Society and vice chair of the  IEEE student branch of Hacettepe University.