Sustainable Living in Smart Environments
| Author | Sabine Seyrkammer, BA |
|---|---|
Publication type | Master Thesis |
| Place Published | St. Pölten |
| Publication date | 01.09.2017 |
| Supervising Tutor | Peter Judmaier |
Abstract
Due to an increasing pressure on performing in society as well as the continuous changing climate condition and its impact on our nature, comfort, security and sustainability are getting more and more important nowadays. By transforming the own home into a so-called smart home, inhabitants could benefit from the reduction of energy consumption, higher security against burglaries and damage, the automatic adaptation of processes to environmental conditions, as well as the comfortable control of devices away from home. A smart home is a technology- equipped flat/house whose equipment is networked to simplify the lives of the inhabitants. This master thesis shows that there are various fields of application which range from the automatic turning of the light when entering a room to the autonomous control of the heating when leaving home to the support of elderly people in order to provide them independence live.
The aim of this thesis is to examine quickly installed and easily retrofitted plug & play devices from Devolo, Fibaro, Philips and Amazon in terms of usefulness, usability, sustainability, user experience, reliability and costs. For this purpose, devices such as motion detectors, door and window sensors, measuring sockets for electrical appliances as well as lamps and the speech recognition device Amazon echo dot were installed and tested in six flats for one week each. Based on the qualitative and quantitative results, recommendations for action and design have been developed. The investigation shows that there are still some weak points with regard to the installation process, technical sophistication and reliability. In addition, the topic of sustainability and automation is only supported little. Inhabitants receive hardly any catchable information regarding resource conservation and must create an explicit rule for each action of the devices.