CSTBox acronym stands for: CSTB Sensing and monitoring ToolBox

CSTBox is a global solution designed by CSTB targeting embedded applications based on ambient instrumentations. It is composed of disseminated devices such as sensors or actuators and provides many features:

• domain specific local processing (analysis, decision taking and storage),
• external system connectivity (ex: data storage server),
• data upload facility
• and complementary webservices.

It deals with heterogeneous protocols in an agnostic and neutral way and allows the creation of solutions using devices from different manufacturers working with different communication media.

One could think that it is just yet-another-home-automation-initiative, as can be found in many flavors of the Internet, be they commercial products (eg. HomeSeer) or open-source projects (eg. openHAB).

The answer is simple: it is not a home automation framework at all.

The initial need which led us to the development of CSTBox was far from this kind of application. We have carefully analyzed existing solutions before initiating the project. Our key need was to produce black boxes applications, initially oriented to ambient assisted living (see "Typical usages" section hereafter for details), without any of these eye catchy user interfaces on smartphones controlling lights or displaying romm temperatures or power consumption.

To quote what an aged volunteer who participated to one of the experiments we have conduced said :

"I understand. Your system is just like the alarm system of my home, but it is for me and not for the home".

She could not have described it better.

Of course, who can do more can do less. So you can create a home automation system with CSTBox if you want, but if all you want is to control you home over the net using your preferred smartphone, you'd better go with one of the other options.

But if you are looking for a base for your domain oriented specific application, and need to talk to a variety of equipments, including industrial grade ones, and be able to add your own specific features in a reusable way, maybe you should consider our works ;)

This solution has already been applied to various domains:

• Elderly Care at Home. Monitoring of daily activity to detect abnormal drifts of habits, often symptoms of diseases or global health degradation.
• Domestic Accident Prevention. Detection of potentially hazardous situations (forgotten opened tap, stove left on for too long without any noticeable related activity,...).
• Nurse Assistance. In hospitals and retirement houses, alert for potential situations demanding attention (movements in rooms at night, accidental falls, patient wandering,...).
• Energy Use. Detection of bad habits and education of occupants with regards to efficiency.
• In-situ Parameter Collection and Analysis for Scientific experiments.
• Usage and Behavior Detection according to Activity Models.

This solution has been designed with the following concerns in mind :

• to be embeddable in low-power devices,
• to be flexible,
• to be easily extensible,
• to be independent from the underlying hardware, and allow transparent replacement of a device by a functionally equivalent one..

The CSTBox concept has been created by the CSTB research team TIDS/IIS based at Sophia-Antipolis.

The team develops and maintains the software framework used as the foundation layer of final applications. The library is regularly extended with components implementing the support of hardwares or reusable services, resulting from needs of ongoing research and experimentation projects. We do this to contribute in turn to the open-source community, without which we could never have created our framework.

Aside from this, we have also designed and developed a set of wireless sensors in the past, used in real-world applications based on the CSTBox. This happened because we could not find at that moment off the shelf products meeting our requirements. This experience provided us a fairly good insight of the "other side" of the problem, namely the world of sensor networks and alike.

You will find here documentation targeting different audiences :

• managers, solution architects,... looking for available tools to develop specific applications
• integrators involved in the assembly of a CSTBox based application
• software developers needing to develop ad-hoc extensions for specific needs
• software developers wanting to contribute to CSTBox framework

Chances are you are now curious about details about why we did it, and how it works.

If so, just continue the journey with us and have a look under the hood by reading some words about the CSTBox key points.