Sensor Fusion-Based Middleware for Smart Homes

Smart homes are sensor-rich environments that contain dynamic sets of interacting components. These components often use competing and closed standards and form a message-based architecture. This complicates the development of applications that require information from disparate sources. It becomes difficult to add new components or to allow components from different applications to interact with each another. In this paper we describe Construct, a pervasive computing middleware that is ideally suited for deployment in the smart home. Construct acts as a sensor fusion layer that takes output from each smart home component and makes it available to all applications. This makes it easy to develop applications that require access to heterogeneous sources of sensor data, and to add sensors to existing systems to improve their performance. This paper demonstrates two Construct-enabled smart home applications and shows how access to new sensors leads to improvements in their performance.