Improving Residential Safety by Multiple Sensors on Multiple Nodes for Joint Emergency Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed sensor network with a voting-based consensus algorithm for smart homes, enhancing emergency detection accuracy, reliability, and energy efficiency across multiple residential hazards.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-sensor, multi-node emergency detection system with a consensus algorithm, improving accuracy and robustness over existing single-device solutions.

Findings

High detection accuracy for five emergency types

Enhanced reliability through consensus voting

Reduced power consumption compared to existing systems

Abstract

Recent advances in low-cost microcontrollers have enabled innovative smart home applications. However, existing systems typically consist of single-purpose devices that only report sensed data to a controller. Given the potential for residential emergencies, we propose to integrate emergency detection systems into smart home environments. We present an ad-hoc distributed sensor network (DSN) designed to detect five common residential emergencies: fires, gas and water leakages, earthquakes, and intrusions. Our novel approach combines diverse sensors with a voting-based consensus algorithm among multiple nodes, improving accuracy and reliability over traditional alert systems. The consensus algorithm employs a majority rule with weighted votes, allowing adjustments for various scenarios. An experimental evaluation confirms our approach's effectiveness in accurately detecting emergencies while demonstrating reliability in mitigating node failures, ensuring system longevity, and maintaining robust communication. Additionally, our approach significantly reduces power consumption compared to alternatives.