Intelligent, remote-controlled home protection system

As our society gets increasingly mobile, it is becoming commonplace for residences to remain vacant for a significant amount of time every day. Unfortunately, emergencies can occur during those time, which may require immediate mitigatory action. This project proposes an approach that allows the resident to be notified of such emergencies and to perform mitigatory actions, even when she is hundreds of miles away. Our infrastructure includes three components: (1) programmable sensor devices to detect emergency situations; (2) a Web service hosted in the resident's home computer to send a notification to the smartphone of the user; and (3) a smartphone app that communicates with this Web service to notify the user, and provides a interface for the user to perform any mitigatory action. We develop a prototype system for detecting fire and intrusion emergencies. Our prototype system uses two sunSPOTs as sensors, an iRobot Create® as a mitigatory device, an Android app for user notification.