Smart home simulation using avatar control and probabilistic sampling

Development, testing and validation of algorithms for smart home applications are often complex, expensive and tedious processes. Research on simulation of resident activity patterns in Smart Homes is an active research area and facilitates development of algorithms of smart home applications. However, the simulation of passive infrared (PIR) sensors is often used in a static fashion by generating equidistant events while an intended occupant is within sensor proximity. This paper suggests the combination of avatar-based control and probabilistic sampling in order to increase realism of the simulated data. The number of PIR events during a time interval is assumed to be Poisson distributed and this assumption is used in the simulation of Smart Home data. Results suggest that the proposed approach increase realism of simulated data, however results also indicate that improvements could be achieved using the geometric distribution as a model for the number of PIR events during a time interval.