Design And Implementation Of An Autonomous Wireless Sensor-Based Smart Home

The Smart home has gained widespread attentions due to its flexible integration into everyday life. This next generation of green home system transparently unifies various home appliances, smart sensors and wireless communication technologies. It can integrate diversified physical sensed information and control various consumer home devices, with the support of active sensor networks having both sensor and actuator components. Although smart homes are gaining popularity due to their energy saving and better living benefits, there is no standardized design for smart homes. In this thesis, a smart home design is put forward that can classify and predict the state of the home utilizing historical data of the home. A wireless sensor network was setup in a home to gather and send data to a sink node. The collected data was utilized to train and test a classification model achieving high accuracy with Support Vector Machine (SVM). SVM was further utilized as a predictor of future home states. Based on the data collection, classification and prediction models, a system was designed that can learn, run with minimal human supervision and detect anomalies in a home. The aforementioned attributes make the system an asset for senior care scenarios

Capital Structure and Performance Evaluation in Manufacturing Sector: A Case Study of Selected Quoted Companies in the Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE)

This study examines the relationship between capital structure and performance value of capitalized manufacturing firms in Nigeria. The annual financial statement of seven (7) manufacturing firms listed in the Nigeria Stock Exchange, covering a period of ten (10) years i.e. 2001-2010 was used in this study. Multiple regression analysis was used to determine the relationship between performance indicators such as return on equity (ROE), return on asset (ROA) and profit margin (PM) as well as the explanatory variables which consist of   Total Asset (TA), Corporate Tax (CT), Annual interest rate (AIR) and Debt-Equity Ratio (TDER) which served as capital structure. Three models were developed for the purpose of determining the relationship which exist between capital structure (TDER) and the various performance indicators (ROE, ROA & PM).           The result showed a negative significant relationship in model one and insignificant in models two and three. The work concludes that there is a negative significant relationship between capital structure and Return on Equity (ROE) and insignificant relationship between capital structure and Return on Asset (ROA) and Profit Margin (PM). The study concludes that management of firms should exercise caution while choosing the amount of debt to use in their capital structure as it affects firms’ performance negatively