Is It Instrumentation? Evaluation of Validity Constraints in Smart Homes

The integrity of sensor datasets used in smart home applications is crucial for tasks like activity recognition and automation. We identify common validity issues such as event ordering errors, lifecycle inconsistencies, and data corruption, which are often overlooked but can significantly affect the reliability of analyses. We present a toolbox based on the BeepBeep stream processing library that enables efficient verification of 19 sanity checks on data streams. Our analysis of 15 publicly available smart home datasets collected by five different research teams reveals that most of them violate key assumptions about sensor behavior, emphasizing the need for pre-validation.