ABASH — Android based smart home monitoring using wireless sensors

Common electrical hazards that occur at home are usually associated with the usage of faulty home appliances and electrical distribution. Also, increasing usage of appliances demands higher electrical power and can cause overloading. The existing electrical house distribution system does not normally offer enough protection and also does not provide adequate warning. The normal protection for residential homes when an over loading happens is that the circuit breaker gets tripped. The best method to improve this situation is to monitor continuously the usage characteristics of electrical power at every power point in real time. Presently, monitoring technologies are available based on wireless sensor network (WSN) because of its capability in identifying remotely the problems in the environment. One most common application of WSN is in home monitoring which helps to optimally manage the `well-being´ of power distribution in home in order to minimize hazards caused by electrical faults. It may also be mentioned that this technique incidentally helps controlling the tariff by maintaining the power usage optimally. It has also been found that not much study has yet been made towards the use of WSN for monitoring electrical power and the consequent hazards with a view to ensure the welfare of residents at home. Based on this idea, we have developed a real time power monitoring system that uses android mobile application and wireless sensor network. The android based smart home monitoring (ABASH) system that we propose in this paper, detects the threshold violation in power usage and produces an appropriate alert signal for homeowners to enable them to take proper remedial actions depending on the situation, much before the circuit breaker operates. The proposed system has been validated specifically for the Brunei Electric standard as a case study. The details are provided in the paper.