SCALE: Safe community awareness and alerting leveraging the internet of things
Kyle E. Benson, Charles Fracchia, Guoxi Wang, Qiuxi Zhu, Serene Almomen, John R. Cohn, Luke D'arcy, Daniel Hoffman, Matthew Makai, Julien Stamatakis, Nalini Venkatasubramanian · IEEE Communications Magazine · 2015
We propose the Safe Community Awareness and Alerting Network (SCALE), a cyber-physical system (CPS) leveraging the pervasive Internet of Things (IoT) to extend a smarter, safer home to all residents at a low incremental cost. SCALE uses novel networking technologies, commodity sensor devices, cloud services, and middleware abstractions to sense, analyze, and act on sensed events in a distributed manner. It monitors environmental factors (i.e. smoke, explosive gas) and automatically alerts residents via phone upon discovery of a possible emergency, enabling them to confirm the event and contact emergency dispatchers with minimal effort. This article describes the inception, design, development, and deployment of a prototype system to achieve these goals. We discuss lessons learned and future directions for general CPS/IoT platforms.