RaspiMonitor: A Raspberry Pi Based Smart Home Monitoring System

Abstract

Novel technological infrastructure such as smart homes have undergone major developments during recent years. Owing to the numerous benefits brought about by smart homes, research on the topic has been increasing at an exponential rate, bringing quality properties such as security, usability, reliability, and others. Despite their various advantages, smart homes have not been in a positive spotlight regarding security and reliability. The main reason that people are hesitant towards adopting an implemented intelligent system at their domicile is due to the lack of trust they allocate to the electronics. As such, this paper provides insights on an innovative and low-cost smart home monitoring system named RaspiMonitor. While the central aim of the system is to offer a robust smart home architecture which discreetly caters for the safety and security of its environment, it also helps in reducing energy wastage. The RaspiMonitor was carefully designed using dynamic web-based services in addition to an evaluation which quantified its usability and acceptance through the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with 6 constructs. Results in principle portray acceptance of the system with a mean score of 4.47. This indicates that a robust hardware and software architecture such as the RaspiMonitor is useful, convenient, and easy to use.