When designing an algorithm or as a means to justify an approach you have pursued in your research you need at some point empirical data. In the case of the IoT, more specifically when it comes to smart homes, there is a lack of open-source datasets available for public access and unfortunately some of them disappear (from the Internet) after being active for a couple of months. My preferred collection of smart home datasets are developed and curated by Washington State University. In particular, I am referring to the Centre for Advanced Studies in Adaptive Systems (CASAS) smart home project.
CASAS is a multi-disciplinary research project focused on creating an intelligent home environment by using IoT technologies such as sensors and actuators. This same team has developed in its recent research the “smart home in a box”, which is a lightweight smart home design that has been installed in 32 homes to capture the participants interactions.
The link to access CASAS datasets is: http://casas.wsu.edu/datasets/. Datasets included consist mainly of ADL activity data of single/two/multi-resident apartments. Some of the datasets are fully annotated with some of them going back to 2007 (and still running) and spanning different countries from Europe to Asia.
Some other useful datasets; highly cited in scholarly publications; that are also featured on CASAS’ website are:
- MavLab Sensor data: http://casas.wsu.edu/datasets/mavlab.zip
- MIT Activity Recognition data: https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004fall/mas622j/04.projects/home/
- University of Amsterdam activity recognition dataset: http://casas.wsu.edu/datasets/kasterenDataset.zip
In case you are not satisfied with the datasets identified here you can also consider two generic sites, working similar to a search engine, but for datasets. I am referring specifically to: DataHub and Google datasets.
An Internet-connected home in the Netherlands.
Now, if you want to take a peek at a cool smart home setup in the Netherlands displaying its captured and processed data in realtime on the Internet take a look at https://www.bwired.nl/index.asp
If you need any information about smart homes or related just get in touch 🙂
Joseph Bugeja 
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