Leveraging Ontology to Enable Indoor Comfort Customization in the Smart Home

This paper introduces the Future Home for Future Communities' Smart Home, a semantic-based framework for indoor comfort metrics customization inside a living environment. The Smart Home merges Ambient Intelligence, Ambient Assisted Living and Context Awareness perspectives to provide customized comfort experience to the dwellers, also leveraging on a ubiquitous interface. The smart home leverages ontological representations of inhabitants' health conditions, comfort metrics and available devices to provide dwellers with indoor temperature, humidity rate, CO2 concentration and illuminance suitable for their health conditions and to the activities they want to perform inside the house. Dwellers interactions within the Smart Home are performed via the interface, while the ontologies composing the knowledge base are reasoned and hosted on a semantic repository. Two use cases depict the framework's functioning in two typical scenarios: adjusting indoor temperature and providing illuminance comfort while preparing a meal.