DTMFTalk: a DTMF-Based Realization of IoT Remote Control for Smart-Home Elderly Care

With the progress of medical science and technology and the healthy changes in eating habits, the proportion of aged population is gradually increasing. Smart-home elderly care has thus attracted a lot of research attention in the recent past, and remains an active issue. Internet of Things (IoT) has been recognized as a key enabler for smart-home elderly care realization. In the literature, a large number of IoT services/applications and platforms have been proposed for health/elderly care. However, research reports showed that their adoption ratio is very low. This is mainly because these packet-switched IoT data communication/networking approaches are too complicated from the perspective of older people. Statistical data reflect that circuit-switched voice telephony is still their most favorable communication mechanism. In this paper, we aim to implement a circuit-switched approach to realizing smart-home elderly care IoT remote control based on our IoT platform,IoTtalk. To the best of our knowledge, our IoTtalk incorporating such capability is the first generic IoT platform in the literature that provides a telecommunication solution for smart-home elderly care. We design and implement an Android App, DTMFTalk, following the application development/execution framework of IoTtalk, to support IoT remote control via circuit-switched Dual Tone MultiFrequency (DTMF) signaling during a phone call conversation. Our real testbed deployment demonstrates that DTMFTalk can constantly and accurately recognize DTMF keys as long as the user holds the desired DTMF keys with enough periods, justifying that DTMFTalk can serve as an effective approach to IoT remote control for smart-home elderly care.