Stanford M.S. Design Project: User-Centric Smart Home
I helped create the future of smart home living to promote sustainability, resident wellbeing, and the work from home experience. The IoT based system uses hardware sensors and a predictive algorithm to autonomously adjust the home to make the user more comfortable. It also uses new technology like the lighting of the room to recommend and notify the user of changes in their home.
Over the course of a year, I worked through the entire design process including needfinding, prototyping, design iterating, and finalizing a product for our client, an Austrian consortium of real estate companies. We developed the solution as described in the brochure and executive summary below. We presented the physical hardware system along with its decision algorithm, operating network, and app at Stanford's ME310 EXPE in June 2022.
Executive Summary:
The EU Green Deal, the Russian-Ukrainian War, and the COVID-19 Pandemic have accelerated the need to improve residential energy efficiency and resident well-being in Vienna, Austria and across Europe. Many current smart energy saving methods have excelled in the commercial space but fail when applied to residential living. Residents want to feel in control of their homes, and the energy savings should ultimately be up to them. To allow them to succeed, they must be aware of their consumption and how to reduce their usage.
The Austrian Real Estate Consortium, AREC, has assembled a team of five Stanford and four TU Wien graduate engineering students to tackle this feat. Through analysis of current “internet of things” style home living technologies and methods for instilling energy efficient living, the team has developed a novel smart home solution called BUTLER. This system focuses on reducing electrical and thermal residential energy consumption. BUTLER automates items in the home, helps residents to understand their energy usage, and gives home integrated recommendations to encourage sustainable practices.
The hardware network, fitted with modules to detect temperature, occupancy, air quality, and door/window state, feeds data into the BUTLER algorithm. Combining this with online weather data and forecasting, the algorithm understands the energy and air quality state of the home. From here, BUTLER automates actions such as the thermostat, blinds, lights, and outlets to be more efficient. It also provides energy recommendations for windows and doors to inform residents about energy practices without forcing them to make changes.
In comparison with other products, BUTLER is uniquely defined by its ability to put the resident in charge of their own lifestyle and home. It strives to make the home more energy efficient without sacrificing the user’s comfort. By using automation, the system is able to take a portion of the burden off residents. For more preferential items, the system relies on auditory and visual indicators toward residents that seamlessly integrate into existing home products such as the lighting and home voice assistant. Furthermore, the system provides a wide range of customizability in the app to fit resident’s personal preferences of automation and recommendations. Residents can visualize the specifics of their usage and efficiency benefits.
In conjunction with these features, the fusion of occupancy sensing methods (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Passive Infrared motion) work to more accurately track the dynamic occupancy of residents over other products in the market. BUTLER uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to understand which residents are home while using Passive Infrared motion detection to pinpoint which rooms are being used. Ultimately, this information allows for clever disabling and enabling of the thermostat and energy consuming outlets to greatly decrease energy consumption without harming residents’ current life habits. Altogether, BUTLER combines novel facets that better mesh with residents’ lifestyles over other available smart home products. It is designed to serve the user and positively inform them on how they can improve. With this system in place, residents can finally feel in control of their homes and help counteract the climate crisis.
