Technical Report
Smart Home Human Activity Simulation Tool for OpenHAB-based Research
Technical Report, 2019.
Experimental Prototype
Smart Home Simulation Tool
(2019)
OpenHAB
MQTT
GUI Simulation
Activity Traces
Synthetic Data
Internet of Things (IoT)
Data Science (DS)
Infrastructure / Systems (IS)
Project Overview
Many smart home studies require realistic activity traces before physical deployments are possible, yet acquiring such data is expensive and time-consuming. This project delivers a graphical user interface driven simulation tool that scripts resident behaviour, publishes events to the openHAB home automation platform via MQTT, and produces synthetic datasets for experimentation. Researchers can define household scenarios by specifying occupant routines, device interactions, and temporal patterns through an intuitive GUI. The tool then generates corresponding event streams that mimic real smart home activity, enabling teams to investigate human-computer interaction, privacy, and wellbeing questions without expensive hardware setups. The simulation supports multiple scenarios and device types, including lighting, heating, appliances, and multimedia systems. By producing configurable and reproducible activity traces, the tool addresses a key barrier to smart home research: the difficulty of collecting ground-truth data from instrumented homes.
The simulation provides an accessible alternative to costly physical sensor deployments. Collecting ground-truth data from instrumented homes is notoriously difficult and expensive, and this tool offers researchers a practical path to generating the activity data they need without requiring dedicated hardware installations.
The generated datasets serve a wide range of downstream research applications. They can be used to prototype analytics pipelines, train machine learning models, and evaluate user interface designs before committing to full-scale physical deployments. This work provides an accessible entry point for researchers and developers seeking to explore smart home data science without the overhead of maintaining a dedicated sensor infrastructure.
Team
Asma Alotaibi
Charith Perera