Idea: A system for efficient failure management in smart IoT environments

Abstract

IoT enabled smart environments are expected to proliferate significantly in the near future, particularly in the context of monitoring services for wellness living, patient healthcare and elderly care. Timely maintenance of failed sensors is of critical importance in such deployments to ensure minimal disruption to monitoring services. However, maintenance of large and geographically spread deployments can be a significant challenge. We present Idea that significantly increases the time-before-repair for a smart home deployment, thereby reducing the maintenance overhead. Specifically, our approach leverages the facts that (a) there is inherent sensor redundancy when combinations of sensors monitor activities of daily living (ADLs) in smart environments, and (b) the impact of each sensor failure depends on the activities being monitored and the functional redundancy afforded by rest of the heterogeneous sensors available for detecting the activities. Consequently, Idea identifies homes that need to be fixed based on expected degradation in ADL detection performance, and optimizes maintenance scheduling accordingly. We demonstrate that our approach leads to 3-40 times fewer maintenance personnel than a scheme in which failed sensors are fixed without considering their impact.