Home Automation industry is growing rapidly; this is
fuelled by the need to provide supporting systems for the elderly
and the disabled, especially those who live alone. Coupled with
this, the world population is confirmed to be getting older. Home
automation systems must comply with the household standards
and convenience of usage. This paper details the overall design of
a wireless home automation system (WHAS) which has been built
and implemented. The automation centres on recognition of voice
commands and uses low-power RF ZigBee wireless
communication modules which are relatively cheap. The home
automation system is intended to control all lights and electrical
appliances in a home or office using voice commands. The system
has been tested and verified. The verification tests included voice
recognition response test, indoor ZigBee communication test, and
the compression and decompression tests of DPCM (Differential
Pulse Code Modulation) speech signals. The tests involved a mix
of 35 male and female subjects with different English accents. 35
different voice commands were sent by each person. Thus the test
involved sending a total of 1225 commands and 79.8% of these
commands were recognised correctly.