scholarly journals Detecting the Presence of Electronic Devices in Smart Homes Using Harmonic Radar Technology

2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 327
Author(s):  
Beatrice Perez ◽  
Gregory Mazzaro ◽  
Timothy J. Pierson ◽  
David Kotz

Data about users is collected constantly by phones, cameras, Internet websites, and others. The advent of so-called ‘Smart Things’ now enable ever-more sensitive data to be collected inside that most private of spaces: the home. The first step in helping users regain control of their information (inside their home) is to alert them to the presence of potentially unwanted electronics. In this paper, we present a system that could help homeowners (or home dwellers) find electronic devices in their living space. Specifically, we demonstrate the use of harmonic radars (sometimes called nonlinear junction detectors), which have also been used in applications ranging from explosives detection to insect tracking. We adapt this radar technology to detect consumer electronics in a home setting and show that we can indeed accurately detect the presence of even ‘simple’ electronic devices like a smart lightbulb. We evaluate the performance of our radar in both wired and over-the-air transmission scenarios.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Zvezdin ◽  
Eduardo Di Mauro ◽  
Denis Rho ◽  
Clara Santato ◽  
Mohamed Khalil

ABSTRACT Consumer electronics have caused an unsustainable amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). Organic electronics, by means of eco-design, represent an opportunity to manufacture compostable electronic devices. Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), or e-waste, is defined as the waste of any device that uses a power source and that has reached its end of life. Disposing of WEEE at landfill sites has been identified as an inefficient solid waste processing strategy as well as a threat to human health and the environment. In the effort to mitigate the problem, practices such as (i) designing products for durability, reparability, and safe recycling, and (ii) promoting closed-loop systems based on systematic collection and reuse/refurbishment have been identified. In this perspective, we introduce a complementary route to making electronics more sustainable: organic electronics based on biodegradable materials and devices. Biodegradable organic electronics lie at the intersection of research in chemistry, materials science, device engineering, bioelectronics, microbiology, and toxicology. The design of organic electronics for standardized biodegradability will allow composting to be an end-of-life option.


Author(s):  
Edwar Romero ◽  
Gerardo Carbajal ◽  
Robert Warrington ◽  
Michael Neuman

This study presents a quantitative analysis of experimental data for extracting energy from human body motion and its possibility of powering portable electronic devices, such as consumer electronics or biomedical monitoring sensors. Since portable electronic devices are typically limited by the size and lifespan of batteries, energy harvesting shows potential as alternative for extending battery life. The acceleration was collected experimentally from 10 subjects while walking and running at different velocities on a treadmill. The acceleration results were studied and a figure of merit consisting of the acceleration-squared-to-frequency was found to determine, in addition to the quality factor, as the important factors for optimal energy harvesting. It was determined that from average walking an energy harvester can produce a power output density greater than 1mW/cm3.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 879 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uwe Köckemann ◽  
Marjan Alirezaie ◽  
Jennifer Renoux ◽  
Nicolas Tsiftes ◽  
Mobyen Uddin Ahmed ◽  
...  

As research in smart homes and activity recognition is increasing, it is of ever increasing importance to have benchmarks systems and data upon which researchers can compare methods. While synthetic data can be useful for certain method developments, real data sets that are open and shared are equally as important. This paper presents the E-care@home system, its installation in a real home setting, and a series of data sets that were collected using the E-care@home system. Our first contribution, the E-care@home system, is a collection of software modules for data collection, labeling, and various reasoning tasks such as activity recognition, person counting, and configuration planning. It supports a heterogeneous set of sensors that can be extended easily and connects collected sensor data to higher-level Artificial Intelligence (AI) reasoning modules. Our second contribution is a series of open data sets which can be used to recognize activities of daily living. In addition to these data sets, we describe the technical infrastructure that we have developed to collect the data and the physical environment. Each data set is annotated with ground-truth information, making it relevant for researchers interested in benchmarking different algorithms for activity recognition.


Polymers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 2797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongli Zhang ◽  
Tiezhu Shi ◽  
Aijie Ma

The boosting of consumer electronics and 5G technology cause the continuous increment of the power density of electronic devices and lead to inevitable overheating problems, which reduces the operation efficiency and shortens the service life of electronic devices. Therefore, it is the primary task and a prerequisite to explore innovative material for meeting the requirement of high heat dissipation performance. In comparison with traditional thermal management material (e.g., ceramics and metals), the polymer-based thermal management material exhibit excellent mechanical, electrical insulation, chemical resistance and processing properties, and therefore is considered to be the most promising candidate to solve the heat dissipation problem. In this review, we summarized the recent advances of two typical polymer-based thermal management material including thermal-conduction thermal management material and thermal-storage thermal management material. Furtherly, the structural design, processing strategies and typical applications for two polymer-based thermal management materials were discussed. Finally, we proposed the challenges and prospects of the polymer-based thermal management material. This work presents new perspectives to develop advanced processing approaches and construction high-performance polymer-based thermal management material.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (19) ◽  
pp. 6399
Author(s):  
Joseph Bugeja ◽  
Andreas Jacobsson ◽  
Paul Davidsson

Smart homes promise to improve the quality of life of residents. However, they collect vasts amounts of personal and sensitive data, making privacy protection critically important. We propose a framework, called PRASH, for modeling and analyzing the privacy risks of smart homes. It is composed of three modules: a system model, a threat model, and a set of privacy metrics, which together are used for calculating the privacy risk exposure of a smart home system. By representing a smart home through a formal specification, PRASH allows for early identification of threats, better planning for risk management scenarios, and mitigation of potential impacts caused by attacks before they compromise the lives of residents. To demonstrate the capabilities of PRASH, an executable version of the smart home system configuration was generated using the proposed formal specification, which was then analyzed to find potential attack paths while also mitigating the impacts of those attacks. Thereby, we add important contributions to the body of knowledge on the mitigations of threat agents violating the privacy of users in their homes. Overall, the use of PRASH will help residents to preserve their right to privacy in the face of the emerging challenges affecting smart homes.


2014 ◽  
Vol 222 ◽  
pp. 99-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inderpreet Kaur ◽  
Shriniwas Yadav ◽  
Sukhbir Singh ◽  
Vanish Kumar ◽  
Shweta Arora ◽  
...  

The technical and economic growth of the twentieth century was marked by evolution of electronic devices and gadgets. The day-to-day lifestyle has been significantly affected by the advancement in communication systems, information systems and consumer electronics. The lifeline of progress has been the invention of the transistor and its dynamic up-gradation. Discovery of fabricating Integrated Circuits (IC’s) revolutionized the concept of electronic circuits. With advent of time the size of components decreased, which led to increase in component density. This trend of decreasing device size and denser integrated circuits is being limited by the current lithography techniques. Non-uniformity of doping, quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons from source to drain and leakage of electrons through gate oxide limit scaling down of devices. Heat dissipation and capacitive coupling between circuit components becomes significant with decreasing size of the components. Along with the intrinsic technical limitations, downscaling of devices to nanometer sizes leads to a change in the physical mechanisms controlling the charge propagation. To deal with this constraint, the search is on to look around for alternative materials for electronic device application and new methods for electronic device fabrication. Such material is comprised of organic molecules, proteins, carbon materials, DNA and the list is endless which can be grown in the laboratory. Many molecules show interesting electronic properties, which make them probable candidates for electronic device applications. The challenge is to interpret their electronic properties at nanoscale so as to exploit them for use in new generation electronic devices. Need to trim downsize and have a higher component density have ushered us into an era of nanoelectronics.


Author(s):  
Handan Ilbegi ◽  
Harun Taha Hayvaci ◽  
Imam Samil Yetik ◽  
Asim Egemen Yilmaz

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