Discussion - Assignment 1
We had a lot of ideas for our Smart Home, but when we started building it we realized that some of the functions were not possible to implement in a physical model. We wanted the bathtub to be able to tell if someone was drowning in it, but since we didn’t have an actual bathtub with actual waters, or waterproof sensors, we were not able to implement this.
Because of the lack of sensors we also didn’t have lights and motion sensors in every room, which would have made us able to tell is someone was in that room or not. Could you do that you could also turn off or on the lights automatically if someone enters or exits a room.
Our system can never be absolutely certain that a person that lies in the bed is sleeping or just resting for a moment, so sometimes it will shut of the bathtub or the stove when it shouldn't have. This could perhaps be fixed with a timer based on the users sleeping habits, or a function that checks the amount of time it has been between the user turning on e.g. the stove and going to bed.
Another problem we didn’t solve was how the bathtub should be able to tell if the person is drowning or not. We didn’t try to implement this in the physical model, for reasons previously mentioned, but even with unlimited sensors we weren’t certain how to do it. Perhaps measure the water level when the person is in the bath with his/hers head above the water and compare it to what the level would be if the users head was under water.
