Welcome to My Home Village, a site to explore home automation (HA), energy saving, and wellbeing projects. HA is an extension of our senses that keeps us in touch with our homes no matter distance. A home, like a computer,  can be smart to help individuals with comfort, energy and health management tasks. My Home Village consists of HA tools for users with distant homes to interact as if they where in one neighborhood collaborating and addressing common issues.

This site describes projects realized at the Domotica Lab in Florence, Italy and at the Home Automation Lab in Berkeley, California. The project started in 2003 by rewiring a house to accommodate a modern family that likes to travel, and that will visit the home at different periods during the year.  Automation was required to frequently open and close the house, to monitor the house remotely over the internet, keep the plants alive when the house is closed, and handle multimedia communication. Now the project is in an advanced stage where intelligence is being added to the controller to save energy, to provide comfort, to increase house safety and security, and to build an information database to increase wellbeing.

A Smart Home must satisfy three requirements:

1) Home Automation, as an extension to users, it must provide solutions to help users in doing repetitive and complex task to improve comfort and security for each home member. The smart home should include learning and supervising algorithms to improve the user comfort and security.

2) ENERGY SAVINGS is a  must to respect the environment, and help the user to change life style to optimize energy consumption and avoiding unnecessary expenses.

3) HEALTH MANAGEMENT.  The home is a private place where we live for many years and it is the best place to monitor, measure, and impact  our wellbeing.

Your experiences, comments, and suggestions are welcome.

Jul 30, 2012
© Andres Albanese 2012