Pattern Implementation in the Consumer Domain

We learned important architectural patterns in previous chapters; this chapter introduces use cases for these patterns that are relevant to the consumer domain. Although numerous use cases exist in the consumer space (e-health, elderly care, pet tracking, energy management, safety and security, robot vacuum cleaners, etc.), the current chapter will detail just two use cases – home automation and a smart egg boiler – to give perspective on the nuances that are involved while implementing consumer IoT use cases. Home automation is an existing use case, whereas the smart egg boiler is an innovative use case – giving credence to the fact that known use cases can not only be implemented by leveraging IoT patterns but can also be used to implement hitherto unknown solutions.

Use case – deploying home automation

Typical home automation deployments provide a combination of the following feature sets:

• Controlling and monitoring appliances, such as air conditioners, refrigerators, or heaters
• The controlling of lights (on/off, a change of color or brightness, or on/off based on a person’s presence)
• An action based on a detected event (for example, an alarm/buzzer sounding when smoke is detected)
• The remote operation of doors and windows
• The detection of an intruder that triggers an alarm
• Conversations with smart speakers

The following figure gives a representational view of home automation implementation:

Figure 4.1 – Sensors/actuators in a home automation use case

As you can see, devices that are battery-operated and have low bandwidth requirements typically transfer data on an energy-efficient protocol (for example, Zigbee), whereas devices such as a video camera send the data...

Use case – a smart egg boiler

There are numerous egg boilers on the market; however, all of them suffer from one basic limitation – they treat all eggs in a batch the same (using the same quantity of water, boiling duration, and so on). However, even eggs from the same hen can have different characteristics. But for the best taste and texture of a boiled egg, each one needs to be treated differently, and boiling conditions need to be customized as per the unique internal and external characteristics of the egg:

• External characteristics include the size, shape, shell color (indicating the hen pedigree), and altitude at which the egg is boiled.
• Internal characteristics include the texture/density/viscosity of the yolk and albumen, egg age (the time difference between the hatching of the egg and the time of the egg being boiled), shell thickness, and proportion of egg white versus egg yolk.

This use case suggests an innovative boiling process for each...

Summary

This chapter demonstrated how the IoT patterns introduced in previous chapters can be used to realize interesting use cases in the consumer domain, thereby demonstrating the efficacy of the patterns. This chapter offered a glimpse of the type of sensors and actuators that we need for our use case implementation. Additionally, this chapter looked at the type of architectural decisions we need to make (for example, the type of logic that must be executed at the edge or DG versus the logic that needs to be implemented or hosted in the central server).

The next chapter will continue our journey, where we will see the type of use cases that are relevant in the retail domain and how they can be implemented using the architectural patterns introduced in previous chapters.