The development of control and energy usage information modules for smart homes.

In this highly information-oriented era, people enjoy the comfort and convenience life brought by technology, even homes simply provide residential purposes also get benefit and become smart ones. Smart homes provide comfortable, security and safety, energy saving and sustainability, and home care to people live in. Even in the absence of smart element, the human living space more or less is able to meet several or all of the above goals since ancient times. However, through modern technology, the result may be more concrete. Collective and independent residential lifestyle has a little different, as also in the construction of the smart home. It is about one hundred thousand of new residential houses built each year in Taiwan. In addition, there are about 8 million exist houses. The difference between exist and new house should be taken into consideration when developing a smart home system. In this paper an integrated module called hybrid smart home module for building a new smart home or renewing a traditional home into smart one is introduced. It consists of processing unit, power acquisition unit, communication unit, bypass unit, web server, and application software. This module provides almost all needed service within a single unit, although it is small but perfectly formed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]