Development of mobile application for smart home energy management: iSHome

Singapore looks forward to be a smart nation soon where smart homes and smart buildings are the key elements. In a smart nation, smart homes will interact themselves and interact with the smart power grid to have a high efficient and sustainable electricity system. Newcastle University, Singapore campus sets out to realistic design and development of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) - enabled collaborative technical and commercial architecture for smart power distribution system in the context of smart homes and smart buildings. This paper presents the design and development of a smart phone application that can control all smart appliances in smart home. A mobile application was developed on Eclipse that allows writing an Android application. These were two versions of the application designed and developed: iSHome 1 and iSHome 2. iSHome 1 is able to communicate with power plugs and iSHome 2 is able to interact with smart home management server. Both versions of the application use Bluetooth for their communication. Even though the current version of the mobile application has not been included any energy saving algorithms, it saves much electrical energy wastage and brings many attractive features to the smart homes.