Research Infrastructure

Smart Home Lab

(2022-)

OpenHAB Smart Home Devices HVAC Cyber-Physical Home Automation

Internet of Things (IoT) Infrastructure / Systems (IS)

The Smart Home Lab is a dedicated research infrastructure featuring over 170 smart home devices spanning lighting, heating ventilation and air conditioning, robotics, multimedia, and household appliances, all connected and orchestrated through the openHAB home automation platform. The lab provides an isolated and controllable environment in which researchers can capture realistic datasets, prototype home automation scenarios, and study security and privacy controls for Internet of Things deployments. The facility supports a wide range of experimental work, from cyber-physical anomaly detection to energy management and occupant behaviour analysis. By hosting diverse device types from multiple manufacturers and communication protocols, the lab reflects the heterogeneity of real-world smart home ecosystems. The lab also serves as a testbed for developing and validating datasets used in machine learning research, including datasets for anomaly detection.

Researchers use the lab to investigate how different devices interact and how automation rules can be designed and tested. The environment also enables studies of how data collected from smart homes can be used for analytics while preserving occupant privacy, providing insights that would be difficult to obtain in occupied residential settings.

The infrastructure is available to support collaborative research projects across the smart home domain. It provides a foundation for reproducible experimentation, enabling researchers from different institutions to run consistent experiments against the same device configurations and data collection pipelines.