**2. Literature review**

#### **2.1. Smart solutions**

**1. Introduction**

**1.1. Smart homes in a sustainable city**

154 Sustainable Cities - Authenticity, Ambition and Dream

**1.2. Elements of a smart home**

**Figure 1.** Home automation system elements.

As more people settle in cities, the increased urbanization requires cities to become sustainable. Sustainable cities provide access to a wide range of basic services such as affordable and clean energy. Globally electricity consumption rates are increasing year on year. One way in which sustainability can be achieved is by providing an affordable range of technologies that enable the management and reduction of electricity consumption. By decreasing the demand for more electricity cities can avoid the construction of more power plants. This can be realized by adopting standards for a wider range technologies that address the reduction in electricity demand. Investment in technology, infrastructure, innovation, sustainable development and scientific research is paramount if this goal is to be achieved. Advanced tools such as information and communication technology (ICT) are able to assist the realization of sustainable cities by enabling urban dwellings to be transformed into smart homes and smart spaces. These technologies can contribute to the global efforts to provide urban citizens access to clean and

As an assistive technology in smart cities, home automation is able to offer a high level of comfort, sophistication, data access, environmental controls, energy management and operational efficiency. Home automation provides an avenue for users to actively participate in accessing and controlling their environments. This is achieved by delivering to users tangible means of energy saving, perimeter security, data access and control of home appliances. As an energy management tool, home automation synchronizes the technology platform with practical benefits such as the ability to reduce home electric bills through control of home

affordable energy and also help the efforts to preserve the environment.

Modern assistive technologies should offer users smart and innovative solutions. These solutions should rely on technology to make tasks easier to manage and complete [1–3]. The rapid improvement in electronic systems such as mobile phones and home appliances are not beneficial to everyone, especially average consumers in developing countries. Energy consumption can be determined through measuring energy usage. This is accomplished using energy meters employing electrical current sensors. In electrical terms, energy consumption is the measure of how much power is used by the load side of an electrical circuit. Consumers wish to enjoy the benefits offered by smart cities such as access to information, remote sensing and automation. Facilities such as home automation can offer users some of these benefits. Recent studies have found that when users have access to their home power usage statistics, they are more readily willing to act or intervene [4, 5]. The other problem that this intervention addresses is the integrated home automation systems with customized installation where the

**Figure 2.** Mobile GSM-based home automation platform.

end users cannot make modifications for their own joy and comfort; mostly these systems are expensive and out of reach for average consumers. Inexpensive solutions are desired to address customer needs.

**3. System design and development**

The system designed for this low-cost implementation uses readily available off-the-shelf components. The control algorithm is housed in an Arduino microcontroller. It is based on an open-source electronic prototyping platform and designed for ease of use. Arduino provides both the hardware components through single-board microcontrollers and also offers a software interface through its Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It is a powerful and popular embedded control solution. This makes the platform affordable for the average

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The solution provided here is indicated in **Figure 4**. A range of home appliances is interfaced with Arduino through its input/output terminals (I/O pins). The control and sensing actions are controlled from the microcontroller. The Arduino host the control architecture which includes the appliance database and the website server. Via the web server, users are able to access the web application on an Android device. User authentication provides added level of

The program flowchart shown in **Figure 5** depicts the decision-making capability inherent in the system solution. The user is prompted after system initialization to authenticate themselves. If the user is not previously registered in the system database, they will not be able to proceed to the next step. If authentication passes, the user enters the home interface page.

security allowing only authenticated users access to the system.

**3.1. Home automation solution**

home user.

**3.2. System algorithm**

**Figure 4.** Implemented home automation system.

#### **2.2. Home automation platforms**

Recently there has been much progress made in the areas of home automation with focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) [6–8].

There have been developments in solutions presented to address home automation. The embedded controller may be provided by a host of different families of microcontrollers such as affordable variants, which include the Atmel ATmega microcontrollers [9], the Arduino [10] or Raspberry Pi [11, 12]. The propriety-based microcontrollers offer a relatively more expensive solution, which is not open-source, nor user code reconfigurable.

The communication channel has been one of the main foci. There have been solutions provided that incorporated the use of Bluetooth technology [13] as well as systems that used ZigBee communication [14]. Some of these include the use of Global System for Mobile communication or GSM network as the communication technology [15]. Such an application is presented in **Figure 2**.

Another variation on the communication channel targets the use of an Ethernet based Internet solution [16]. Such a system is depicted in **Figure 3**.

**Figure 3.** An Internet-Ethernet-based home automation platform.
