Situation-Awareness Interactive Self-Check-in Services by Smartphones and Smart Locks

Abstract

One of the secure and intelligent functionalities in smart cities is a so-called smart lock and its operability. Smart door locks have been developed and deployed in home or hotel doors, building entrance doors, car doors, elevators, etc. It can be locked and unlocked by smartphone applications as well as it can be globally managed by a cloud server. However, the level of smartness in such door locks and its operability is not satisfied in part because the so-called smart lock is not inactive to the smartphone applications, and in part because the lock and the smartphone do not aware the situations surrounding one another. This paper surveys the current technologies and employ sensor and restful API server technologies to the smart lock development and the lock/unlock interoperability. The door locks will be smarter as the situations surrounding the smartphones is recognized or as the credentials of the human is verified. The most reliable requirement for smart self-check-in services includes 1) the appropriate services to guest's lock requests, and 2) the efficient and situation-awareness services in self-locking/-unlocking doors. To achieve the requirement, this paper proposes ways of resolving the errors by interoperating with sensors, and ways of improving the smartness of locks by interactive communications with a cloud server and smartphone applications. The contribution includes an improvement of the security and intelligence in smart self-check-in services.