Wireless cross-platform interactive home automation system for long-term care facilities

This paper presents a wireless cross-platform interactive home automation system for long-term care facilities, based on the commercially available card-size embedded systems Banana Pi M1 and Intel® Edison. The designed system was divided into two parts, the host and distributed terminals, and various kinds of sensors can be bundled with the distributed terminals. The host can query every sensor on a distributed terminal using the known IP address and defined keywords via a TCP chat service. Each distributed terminal might have different numbers and kinds of sensors for various purposes. This feature provides flexibility and extendibility. Users can watch live video shot by a web camera, and query every sensor on the distributed terminals using an Android application. These features are useful when users are not home.