SensePods: A ZigBee-Based Tangible Smart Home Interface

Low-cost sensors and ubiquitous wireless networking is enabling novel ways in which homeowners can interact with their smart homes. Many complementary approaches like using voice commands, direct interaction by using touch or weight, or by using body gestures are emerging. This paper shows the design and implementation of a novel low-power, low-cost, hand-held wireless device called a SensePod. SensePods can be used by a consumer to interact with a smart home using simple gestures like rubbing, taping or rolling the device on any home surface like a dining table. The device is only 4.5 cm long, forms an ad-hoc wireless network using the ZigBee protocol, and can be easily interfaced to existing home management systems using a universal serial bus port. The gestures in each device can be programmed to control various objects of a smart home like smart curtains, for example. Hidden Markov models were used to train the device to recognize various gestures. The device was tested with a variety of gestures and has a recognition rate of over 99.7%, and a response time of less than two milliseconds.