Smart Homes and Sustainable Cities: The Design of a Low-Cost Solution for Comprehensive Home Automation

The challenge for smart cities is to connect as many of its inhabitants to technology enabling solutions that improve their lives. Smart homes provide all users a means of interacting and impacting their environment. In developing economies this proves chal- lenging and these challenges are daunting and overwhelming since system costs are always a foreboding factor. The chapter addresses these challenges by providing a low- cost solution for a home energy saving measure. It introduces an overview of enabling technologies for a smart home by considering energy management, energy saving, load management and monitoring and control of living spaces. By leveraging the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and load management strategies, the realisation of a smart home is made possible. This chapter presents a broad overview of the design and development of a web-enabled smart home solution. Web development and control systems together form the backbone of automation for modern home automation technologies such as the Internet of Things and embedded systems. The developed web-enabled home automation incorporates elements of web developed software application and digital control systems. The web-enabled interface energy saving measure is a networked sys- tem that uses web-enabled applications for enabling energy efficiency by incorporating load management, remote power consumption, monitoring and control.