Smart homes have been an active area of research, however despite considerable investment, they are not yet a reality for end-users. Moreover, there are still accessibility challenges for the elderly or the disabled, two of the main potential targets for home automation. In this exploratory study we design a control mechanism for smart homes based on Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) and apply it in the “Domus”1 smart home platform in order to evaluate the potential interest of users about BCIs at home. We enable users to control lighting, a TV set, a coffee machine and the shutters of the smart home. We evaluate the performance (accuracy, interaction time), usability and feasibility (USE questionnaire) on 12 healthy subjects and 2 disabled subjects. We find that healthy subjects achieve 77% task accuracy. However, disabled subjects achieved a better accuracy (81% compared to 77%).

Research on context management and activity recognition in smart environments is essential in the development of innovative well adapted services. This paper presents two main contributions. First, we present ContextAct@A4H, a new real-life dataset of daily living activities with rich context data 4. It is a high quality dataset collected in a smart apartment with a dense but non intrusive sensor infrastructure. Second, we present the experience of using temporal logic and model checking for activity recognition. Temporal logic allows specifying activities as complex events of object usage which can be described at different granularity. It also expresses temporal ordering between events thus palliating a limitation of ontology based activity recognition. The results on using the CADP toolbox for activity recognition in the real life collected data are very good.

Smart homes aim at enhancing the quality of life of people at home by the use of home automation systems and Ambient Intelligence. Most of these smart homes provide enhanced interaction by relying on context-aware systems learned on data. Whereas voice-based interaction is the current emerging trend, most available corpora are either concerned only with home automation sensors or only with audio technology, which limits the development of context-aware voice-based systems. This paper presents the VocADom@A4H corpus, which is a dataset composed of users' interactions recorded in a fully equipped Smart Home. About 12 hours of multichannel distant speech signal synchronized with logs of an openHAB home automation system were collected from 11 participants who performed activities of daily living with the presence of real-life noises, such as other persons speaking, use of vacuum cleaner, TV, etc. This corpus can serve as a valuable material for studies in pervasive intelligence, such as human tracking, human activity recognition, context aware interaction, and robust distant speech processing in the home. Experiments performed on multichannel speech and home automation sensors data for robust voice activity detection and multiresident localization show the potential of the corpus to support the development of context-aware smart home systems.