Enabling Automation and Edge Intelligence over Resource Constraint IoT Devices for Smart Home

Abstract Smart home applications are pervasive and have gained popularity due to the overwhelming use of Internet of Things (IoT). The revolution in IoT technologies made homes more convenient, efficient and perhaps more secure. The need to advance smart home technology is necessary at this stage as IoT is abundantly used in automation industry. However, most of the proposed solutions are lacking in certain key areas of the system i.e., high interoperability, data independence, privacy, and optimization in general. The use of machine learning algorithms requires high-end hardware and are usually deployed on servers, where computation is convenient, but at the cost of bandwidth. However, more recently edge AI enabled systems are being proposed to shift the computation burden from server side to the client side enabling smart devices. In this paper, we take advantage of the edge AI enabled technology to propose a fully featured cohesive system for smart home based on IoT and edge computing. The proposed system makes use of industry standards adopted for fog computing as well as providing robust response from connected IoT sensors in a typical smart home. The proposed system employs edge devices as a computational platform in terms of reducing energy cost and provides security, while remotely controlling all appliances behind a secure gateway. A case study of human fall detection is evaluated by a custom lightweight Deep Neural Network (DNN) architecture implemented over edge device of the proposed framework. The case study is validated using the Le2i dataset. During the training, the early stopping threshold is achieved with 98% accuracy for training set and 94% for validation set. The model size of the network is 6.4 MB, which is significantly lower than other networks with similar performance, showing suitability of the proposed system for smart home.