Low-Cost Energy-efficient Voice-Activated Home Automation System – Addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

In the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), countries are encouraged to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. With the rapid technological advancement in the area of home automation and the ever-increasing consumption of energy, it is necessary to adopt smart control systems that help to reduce the cost and emission of greenhouse gases. This work aims to reduce the amount of energy consumption by implementing a customized design of a voice-controlled hardware/software embedded platform. The prototype utilizes an Android mobile application in addition to a software-controlled On/Off switch that controls home appliances. The proposed prototype is cost-effective, power efficient, and user-friendly. An Android-based mobile application also facilitates its usability by controlling home appliances using voice-activated commands. This work demonstrates a fully functional small-scale prototype using Arduino IDE which could easily be scaled up to an industrial scale as an IoT (Internet of Things) device. The energy efficiency of the hardware platform is solely dependent on the Arduino board that acts as a hub between all the electrical appliances and the Firebase mobile application. To optimize the energy consumption of the utilized hardware, different energy-efficient modes are implemented and results are reported.