Using Interoperability between Mobile Robot and KNX Technology for Occupancy Monitoring in Smart Home Care

It is important for older and disabled people who live alone to be able to cope with the daily challenges of living at home. In order to support independent living, the Smart Home Care (SHC) concept offers the possibility of providing comfortable control of operational and technical functions using a mobile robot for operating and assisting activities to support independent living for elderly and disabled people. This article presents a unique proposal for the implementation of interoperability between a mobile robot and KNX technology in a home environment within SHC automation to determine the presence of people and occupancy of occupied spaces in SHC using measured operational and technical variables (to determine the quality of the indoor environment), such as temperature, relative humidity, light intensity, and CO₂ concentration, and to locate occupancy in SHC spaces using magnetic contacts monitoring the opening/closing of windows and doors by indirectly monitoring occupancy without the use of cameras. In this article, a novel method using nonlinear autoregressive Neural Networks (NN) with exogenous inputs and nonlinear autoregressive is used to predict the CO₂ concentration waveform to transmit the information from KNX technology to mobile robots for monitoring and determining the occupancy of people in SHC with better than 98% accuracy.