A framework for heterogeneous home monitoring WSN networks

During the last years Home Monitoring has emerged as a prominent research and development area able to offer significant services to a wide variety of application scenarios. Without a doubt, factors of critical importance that propelled respective interest include advancements in ICT areas such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), hardware design and adequate sensors´ circuitry implementation. However, most of the existing solutions focus on the use of specific and even custom technologies which result into systems of limited usefulness, flexibility and extensibility unable to cover all aspects of home monitoring. Aiming to address such inefficiencies this paper presents the design and implementation of the ADVENT Home Monitoring system embracing heterogeneity in various aspects. At the same time it is of paramount importance for the system to be well accepted by all users regardless to their technological or educational background. Therefore, considerable effort has been devoted so as to present the underlying heterogeneous system in a homogenous, user friendly and attractive way to the end user. Furthermore, a critical goal is to present a continuously extending system able to adopt new ICT advancement and thus be versatile in order to cover different and diverse user required services and applications.