Challenges in Health Smart Homes

Technology and health care : official journal of the European Society for Engineering and Medicine, 2009

To address an aging population, we have been investigating sensor networks for monitoring older adults in their homes. In this paper, we report ongoing work in which passive sensor networks have been installed in 17 apartments in an aging in place eldercare facility. The network under development includes simple motion sensors, video sensors, and a bed sensor that captures sleep restlessness and pulse and respiration levels. Data collection has been ongoing for over two years in some apartments. This longevity in sensor data collection is allowing us to study the data and develop algorithms for identifying alert conditions such as falls, as well as extracting typical daily activity patterns for an individual. The goal is to capture patterns representing physical and cognitive health conditions and then recognize when activity patterns begin to deviate from the norm. In doing so, we strive to provide early detection of potential problems which may lead to serious health events if lef...

2010

In the last decade, the number of elderly population has increased significantly which affects human in many aspects, especially in healthcare. Many studies have shown increases in expenditures on longterm care. New models of care are needed including supported self-care and home-based services. Advance in sensor and network technologies have made these possible. A smart home which is a residence equipped with smart technologies providing services that enhance human way of living i.e. safety, security, entertainment, etc would allow elderly to maintain living independently in their homes and still in control of their healthcare cost and status. This paper reviews various topics on smart home technologies including smart home projects, smart home network, smart home appliance and sensor technologies for smart home. A successful adoption of smart home technologies requires appreciation of stakeholders’ perceptions, needs and concerns. A survey has been carried out at a major hospital,...

Journal of Ageing and Longevity

Most older adults desire to be as independent as possible and remain living in their ancestral home as they age. Aging-in-place maximizes the independence of older adults, enhancing their wellbeing and quality of life while decreasing the financial burden of residential care costs. However, due to chronic disease, multimorbidity, and age-related changes, appropriate conditions are required to make aging-in-place possible. Remote monitoring with smart home technologies could provide the infrastructure that enables older adults to remain living independently in their own homes safely. The health-assistive smart home shows great promise, but there are challenges to integrating smart homes on a larger scale. The purpose of this discussion paper is to propose a Design Thinking (DT) process to improve the possibility of integrating a smart home for health monitoring more widely and making it more accessible to all older adults wishing to continue living independently in their ancestral ho...

The technology of Smart Homes (SH), as an instance of ambient assisted living technologies, is designed to assist the homes’ residents accomplishing their daily-living activities and thus having a better quality of life while preserving their privacy. A SH system is usually equipped with a collection of inter-related software and hardware components to monitor the living space by capturing the behaviour of the resident and understanding his activities. By doing so the system can inform about risky situations and take actions on behalf of the resident to his satisfaction. The present survey will address technologies and analysis methods and bring examples of the state of the art research studies in order to provide background for the research community. In particular, the survey will expose infrastructure technologies such as sensors and communication platforms along with artificial intelligence techniques used for modeling and recognizing activities. A brief overview of approaches used to develop Human–Computer interfaces for SH systems is given. The survey also highlights the challenges and research trends in this area.

Maturitas, 2009

In an ageing world, maintaining good health and independence for as long as possible is essential. Instead of hospitalization or institutionalization, the elderly and disabled can be assisted in their own environment 24 h a day with numerous 'smart' devices. The concept of the smart home is a promising and cost-effective way of improving home care for the elderly and the disabled in a non-obtrusive way, allowing greater independence, maintaining good health and preventing social isolation. Smart homes are equipped with sensors, actuators, and/or biomedical monitors. The devices operate in a network connected to a remote centre for data collection and processing. The remote centre diagnoses the ongoing situation and initiates assistance procedures as required. The technology can be extended to wearable and in vivo implantable devices to monitor people 24 h a day both inside and outside the house. This review describes a selection of projects in developed countries on smart homes examining the various technologies available. Advantages and disadvantages, as well as the impact on modern society, are discussed. Finally, future perspectives on smart homes as part of a home-based health care network are presented.

2009

The part of the population above 70 years is increasing rapidly. This will put an immense pressure on the eldercare, with scarce resources to accommodate for such a demographic situation. Therefore the importance of enabling the elderly to live in their own home as long as possible is crucial. The health smart home area is able to facilitate such living. While developers still believe in the potential of such technology, the level of adoption among the elderly is low. This study focuses on discussing some design implications that is of importance for systems addressing this social group. In order to achieve this, five qualitative interviews was conducted with elderly between the ages of 70 and 85. The elderly was asked questions within three main aspects of a health smart home: social robots, health and security. A number of quality attributes were identified in the study and all of them fall under the two major categories, acceptability (Usability, Affordability) and trustworthiness (Safety, Security, Reliability, Privacy). The insight from the study may serve as a basis for further discussions of design implications for the health smart home area.

2010

Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications, 2012

Smart houses support services which ease and secure people's lives. The applications that a smart house can support are realised by wireless sensors and are divided into the following five categories (Stefanov, Bien, Bang, 2004), (Dewsbury, Taylor, Edge, 2002): • Energy management: Applications which can control the heating and lighting system ABSTRACT Smart houses represent a modern technology which can secure and facilitate our life. The objective of this chapter is to adapt medical sensors to home automated systems, which collect medical data such as blood pressure, heart rate and electrical heart activity for elderly and/or disabled persons. Firstly, the collected data is transferred to a home server and to an external manager for further analysis. Subsequently, data is stored at a database where monitoring is available only for authorized users via a simple web interface. The IEEE 802.15.4 wireless standard has been chosen as the preferred solution for communication in the smart house. Finally, two implementation scenarios of the smart house for an elderly and/or disabled person are simulated using the Custodian software tool. This case study shows that simulating the automation system of a smart house before the implementation is advantageous.

Smart Home Systems, 2010

2007

This paper reports on initial stages of a case study of building a consortium to undertake research into advanced technologies and telecommunications that support the notion of an assisted care 'Smart Home'. The aim is to through research and development to provide greater independence, improved quality of life and reduce unnecessary hospital admission for the dependant being cared for in their own homes including the frail elderly, chronic illness sufferers and people with disabilities. The primary outcome is the intent to support families and professional carers, reduce costs and, where possible, identify commercial opportunities for new products and services. Queensland Smart Home Initiative (QSHI) is discussed as a case study together with the Consortium's first Smart Home at an aged care facility in Queensland, Australia.

Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, 2008

c o m p u t e r m e t h o d s a n d p r o g r a m s i n b i o m e d i c i n e 9 1 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 55-81 a b s t r a c t

2018 5th International Multi-Topic ICT Conference (IMTIC), 2018

a rapidly ageing population requires support systems which would enable them to preserve dwellers' independence without compromising on their safety or their quality of life. Smart homes for the elderly have the potential to offer unobtrusive health and wellness monitoring. The aim is to provide a safe, independent living environment which can identify and predict problems by monitoring the activities of daily living (ADLs) of the inhabitants. For this, a system able to handle continuous streams of data is required. Such a system can extract the information by using appropriate classification and learning algorithms and thus allow the remote monitoring of health and wellbeing at a high level. The implementation requires: the use of appropriate sensing technologies, identification of ADLs, data pre-processing techniques and machine learning algorithms. This is challenging due to individual differences: such a system must be able to personalize individual needs. Our contribution was the design and implementation of a platform to smartly monitor health condition of elderly using sensor data from a smart home, through an interactive user interface which is user-friendly and multiplatform. This proof-of-concept used off-line data, with the view to extend to real-time data collection in the future, which could then be used to inform support providers remotely.

2016 5th International Conference on Informatics, Electronics and Vision (ICIEV), 2016

Nearly one billion people are suffering from various disabilities around the world. People in developed countries have resources, facilities and technologies to cope up while in developing countries, they suffer more due to lack of facilities and assistive technologies. Many technologies have been considered as cost effective solution to overcome the limitations in developing countries and Smart Home (SH) is one them. SH is a vision of home automation system that interacts with the users to provide comfort and ease of access. SH embedded with assistive technologies can provide better living facilities for disabled people. As a result they can control home appliances without movement and interact better with their surroundings. It could help improving their confidence and self-esteem thus, enhancing the quality of life. In this study, we have presented SH system for disabled people that can improve their lives, focusing on the key features, major challenges and potentials of SHs.

International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences, 2020

The term Home communication systems refers to the devices that allow the people to communicate using audio visual aids from various spaces in the home without direct interaction. These devices are going to be very familiar technology that will be adopted in the near future while designing both residential and commercial interiors to ensure comfortability and safety. Ageing population and advancement of modern smart technologies are mutually playing a crucial role in both developing and developed countries for providing services to the elderly people to age in place (Bostjan, 2018). Smart homes with required communication systems and healthcare facilities can allow the elderly