Smart Home in a Box is a free program that allows you to be part of a high impact research project that strives to create a long-term smart environment testbed to collect activity data in your home. The collected activity data is essential for our research and allows us to build advanced algorithms that can accurately identify a variety of activities which are necessary to building smart home applications. The benefits of accurate activity recognition has a tremendous amount of value including medical/assisted living applications for our aging population and developing more energy efficient environments. Accurate activity recognition will mean that we can build better home automation tools that will allow elderly to remain home longer or simply turn the lights off in a room when there are no occupants to conserve energy.
How You Can Help
By signing up for our program, you will be placed into consideration to receive a free Smart Home in a Box kit that will include the following components:
- One smart home server. This device is the brains of the smart home data collection and is responsible for talking to the sensors to collect the sensor data and upload it to our central server for the purpose of training our software tools.
- Sensors. Depending on the layout of your residence, we will ship you all the sensors you require to collect the valuble information we require. There may be anywhere from 10 to 20 sensors per Smart Home in a Box implementation.
What about security
It is true,we will be collecting a lot of information about you. But keep in mind, we are only interested in training our algorithms. Additionally, all the data will be housed in a secure server facility behind locked doors. As part of our research we are required to be HIPAA compliant and we take extreme measures to ensure any data we collect via the sensors transmitted using industry standard encryption technologies. Additionally, your data is anonymous. We do not directly associate test bed data with inviduals in our research. We maintain this separation to not only protect you, but our research staff as well.