A Smart Home Appliance Control System for Physically Disabled People

The construction and conversion of ordinary homes into “smart homes” has seen a tremendous rise in recent years. This can be ascribed to technologies such as the Internet of Things, sensors, smart phones, smart appliances, cloud computing, and digital assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Microsoft Cortana. At the outset, smart homes were built to enhance the quality of life for ordinary nondisabled persons. Impressively, we have seen smart home residents reaping the benefits of security, energy saving, and the ability to control their lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), door locks, and coffee makers while they are in their space of comfort, for example in bed or siting on a couch. However, most smart home devices are not designed with people with disabilities and limited range of movement in mind. Of course, being able to control home devices using smart technology could be a tremendous benefit to people with physical disabilities and the older persons. This paper presents a system that uses smart plugs, smart cameras, smart power strips and a digital assistant such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Google Assistant, Apple Siri, or Microsoft Cortana to capture voice commands, from a person with physical disabilities, spoken in a much more natural way to control ordinary home electrical appliances in order to turn them on or off, with minimal exertion.