A Testbed Evaluation for a Privacy-Aware Monitoring System in Smart Home

An ambient assisted living system can help people improve residents' quality of lives in their homes while managing the energy resources more efficiently using wireless portable monitoring systems. The key challenges for such monitoring systems are scarce energy and privacy concerns. This paper reports an experimental study to evaluate a threshold-based monitoring method for temperature and light sensing to reduce energy consumption of the sensor nodes which increases the lifetime of the monitoring system. We have implemented a testbed using PIR sensors to monitor the behaviour of a single resident house considering the willingness for independent living in senior citizens. The overall results and analysis of our testbed shows more than 90% reduction in the number of transmitted packets which have increased the lifetime of ambient monitoring system. Furthermore, the AES encryption algorithm is selected to be implemented in our smart home testbed to evaluate the confidentiality of collected data.