Design Perceptive

I like the concept of a minimalism when it comes to the home. It appeals to the senses by simplicity. And, in my opinion, one characteristic of a minimalist home is that it requires minimal effort to run and maintain. In other words, it is very hands off. So, I’ve been working with intelligent control systems, adding them as I can. Recently, I installed a simple timer-based irrigation system for my garden and patio.

Now, I’ve started looking at controls for the HVAC. I want to be comfortable, but I don’t want to have to deal with the thermostat anymore. I also want to save money, but I don’t want the hassle of trying to figure out everyone’s schedules and programming the system for that. Now, these goals are somewhat contradictory. If I wanted to maximize my money savings, I simply turn off the AC. But, that costs me in terms of comfort. If I want to be comfortable I run the system, and I am going to incur operating expense. There’s a balance here somewhere.

So, after a little foray into a Research Experience for Undergrads, where I did some research into intelligent control systems, I’ve decided to start wiring up my house. I have a good thermostat that gives me the ability to control the HVAC via my computer. I can also read information about the temperature in the house.

I also need to keep track of who is home and who isn’t. To do this, I’ve enlisted the help of Google and my cell phone. Every so often, my phone tells Google where it is. I can pull this information straight off the web through a nifty URL Google provides. I currently have my home computer doing this every 10 minutes. I’m going to let it run tonight and all day tomorrow.

I propose to use this mechanism to train an artificial neural network designed to learn my occupancy patterns. This can be used to determine if I’m going to be home at any particular time, giving my HVAC something to work with to determine when it should operate.

Facebook is an interesting tool.  Specifically, this status update element got me thinking about things in context-aware computing.  On the one hand, wouldn’t it be interesting to update your Facebook status automatically in some cases?  (privacy concerns notwithstanding)  Wouldn’t it also be interesting to see how providing explicit status updates could assist computers in providing resources to you?

I think it would be.  So, I’m going to start collecting some data.  I’m going to start with a month worth of trying to give Facebook a status update every context-shift at the very least.  The only exception will be when I’m in bed for sleeping, which will be delineated.  If a month works out, I may extend it.  A month would be (considering 8 hours sleep): 1+ entry per hour for 16 hours every day for 28 days =  448+ entries which might not be enough good data.  We’ll make the determination on Friday morning four weeks from now.

For an overview of Context-aware pervasive systems see the wiki entry: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-aware_pervasive_systems