Blockchain Use in Home Automation for Children Incentives in Parental Control

Application of IoT (Internet of Things) is expanding rapidly as internet connects things in our homes and our personal devices and even our body, provides ease, entertainment and comfort to our daily lives. However, as everything personal is connected, security and privacy becomes a major challenge. Blockchain-based IoT can provide a completely trusted and transparent environment with its tamper-resistant data structure, timestamp, data encryption and distributed consensus. Since cryptocurrency is the first application of blockchains, most blockchain mechanisms like Ethereum provides token-based peer-to-peer payment system that allows payment using a custom currency which enables IoT devices to pay or receive token without a third-party inclusion. In this paper we proposed to apply blockchain mechanism to education/discipline of children at home by through token-based parental control in which parent can encourage good behaviors and discourage bad behaviors of children via tokens transferred via blockchain network. Current parental control is implemented in operating systems of smartphones that only prohibits the abuse of smartphone games or inappropriate web sites. However, this token-based parental control pay tokens to children with good behaviors that allow them to play or watch the proper contents as their rewards. Devices at home like television and computer are connected to the blockchain and accessible only when the user have a sufficient amount of tokens. Children are given incentives in term of token by their parents if they do their homework properly or help their parents. Besides that, smart contract feature in Ethereum allows application to be programmed in a blockchain enables monitoring the activities of children through blockchain. This paper introduces the design of the token-based parental control by using smart contract schemes of Ethereum blockchain with a simple smart home setup as a proof of concept.