Design issues and solutions in a modern home automation system

Home automation revolves around the user as well as the technology in terms of usability and features. The aim of this paper is to provide an holistic and practical view on the design of a real home automation system. This overview is based on a practical experience gained by creating a real wireless home automation system. Our discussion is focused on two main issues: the actual communicating devices and the user interface. The first part of the paper provides a brief analysis on main issues in existing home automation systems. To this aim, we propose a solution based on XBee and show how XBee modules can be exploited to build up a scalable and fully customizable home automation system. The second part of the paper discusses how the user interface in home automation has been addressed in existing approaches with a focus on mobile devices. We show how we leveraged on multi-platform programming frameworks to create a modern user interface.