Remote Control of Home Appliances Using Mobile Phone: A Polymorphous Based System

The current trend in computing has launched us into a world of numerous, easily accessible computing devices connected to each other and to an increasingly ubiquitous network infrastructure which has created new opportunities in Information Technology. This trend has proven to be a solution to electricity costs which has experienced geometric increase in some countries. Leaving electronic devices on at home while away for work or when you embark on a trip has its inherent dangers, as well as rising energy consumption which amounts to waste. This paper presents a smart space of networked devices which is programmed with a mobile phone. We used object-oriented methodology to model the home appliances. The end-user can monitor and control his home appliances with his mobile phone from any location at any time. We examined some existing one-to-one based systems which assumed that the devices must have a mobile phone attached to the controller which leverages on the components of the ‘second’ phone to complete communication with the device. Here the system depended on the already built component of the used phone and if the second phone is removed the system will fail. In our research, we developed a polymorphous based system (one-to-many), which uses only a single phone. The user phone requires no other phone at the receiving end and can communicate with a controller with multiple ports making it polymorphous. We also developed custom-made module for reception of signals independent of the second phone. The system was implemented using Arduino microprocessor and a GSM module which forms the server side of the system. A prototype of our system was carried out successfully. With our system, multiple appliances could be switched OFF or ON simultaneously compared with the existing ones that are capable of handling one appliance at a time.