Supportive Smart Homes


Book Description

Significant health-industry human resource needs increase the reliance on family and friends to support older adults hoping to age in place. This book explores how recent improvements in integrated home technologies have the potential to address those challenges. The book considers how embedded home sensors can be used to monitor the health and wellbeing of older adults and how that can be used to assist with supporting safety and well-being. The content is designed to help multiple stakeholders in the supportive smart home space to better understand the complexity of this field and the need for transdisciplinary collaboration. These stakeholders include the older adults who will benefit from supportive smart home technology; informal and formal caregiver and healthcare professionals concerned about the older adult’s well-being; researchers from multiple disciplines in the supportive smart home area and their funders; companies looking to develop solutions and services or expand their offerings; policy makers who want to ensure privacy and equity in access and a successful integration of these technologies into the evolving health and social services sectors; and students, the future leaders in AgeTech. Overall, the intent of the book is to inspire engineers, computer scientists, industrial designers, clinicians and healthcare providers, social scientists, students, policy makers, and older adults and their caregivers to collaborate in advancing the supportive smart home space to develop more options for aging in place.




Handbook of Smart Homes, Health Care and Well-Being


Book Description

Smart homes, home automation and ambient-assisted living are terms used to describe technological systems that enrich our living environment and provide means to support care, facilitate well-being and improve comfort. This handbook provides an overview of the domain from the perspective of health care and technology. In Part 1, we set out to describe the demographic changes in society, including ageing and diseases and impairments which lead to the needs for technological solutions. In Part 2, we describe the technological solutions, ranging from sensor-based networks, components, to communication protocols that are used in the design of smart homes. We also deal will biomedical features which can be measured and services that can be delivered to end-users as well as the use of social robots. In Part 3, we present best practices in the field. These best practices mainly focus on existing projects in Europe, the USA and Asia, in which people receive help through dedicated technological solutions being part of the continuum of the home environment and care.




Smart Homes and Their Users


Book Description

Smart home technologies promise to transform domestic comfort, convenience, security and leisure while also reducing energy use. But delivering on these potentially conflicting promises depends on how they are adopted and used in homes. This book starts by developing a new analytical framework for understanding smart homes and their users. Drawing on a range of new empirical research combining both qualitative and quantitative data, the book then explores how smart home technologies are perceived by potential users, how they can be used to link domestic energy use to common daily activities, how they may (or may not) be integrated into everyday life by actual users, and how they serve to change the nature of control within households and the home. The book concludes by synthesising a range of evidence-based insights, and posing a series of challenges for industry, policy, and research that need addressing if a smart home future is to be realised. Researchers will find this book provides useful insights into this fast-growing field




The Best Interface Is No Interface


Book Description

Our love affair with the digital interface is out of control. We’ve embraced it in the boardroom, the bedroom, and the bathroom. Screens have taken over our lives. Most people spend over eight hours a day staring at a screen, and some “technological innovators” are hoping to grab even more of your eyeball time. You have screens in your pocket, in your car, on your appliances, and maybe even on your face. Average smartphone users check their phones 150 times a day, responding to the addictive buzz of Facebook or emails or Twitter. Are you sick? There’s an app for that! Need to pray? There’s an app for that! Dead? Well, there’s an app for that, too! And most apps are intentionally addictive distractions that end up taking our attention away from things like family, friends, sleep, and oncoming traffic. There’s a better way. In this book, innovator Golden Krishna challenges our world of nagging, screen-based bondage, and shows how we can build a technologically advanced world without digital interfaces. In his insightful, raw, and often hilarious criticism, Golden reveals fascinating ways to think beyond screens using three principles that lead to more meaningful innovation. Whether you’re working in technology, or just wary of a gadget-filled future, you’ll be enlighted and entertained while discovering that the best interface is no interface.




Smart Assisted Living


Book Description

Smart Homes (SH) offer a promising approach to assisted living for the ageing population. Yet the main obstacle to the rapid development and deployment of Smart Home (SH) solutions essentially arises from the nature of the SH field, which is multidisciplinary and involves diverse applications and various stakeholders. Accordingly, an alternative to a one-size-fits-all approach is needed in order to advance the state of the art towards an open SH infrastructure. This book makes a valuable and critical contribution to smart assisted living research through the development of new effective, integrated, and interoperable SH solutions. It focuses on four underlying aspects: (1) Sensing and Monitoring Technologies; (2) Context Interference and Behaviour Analysis; (3) Personalisation and Adaptive Interaction, and (4) Open Smart Home and Service Infrastructures, demonstrating how fundamental theories, models and algorithms can be exploited to solve real-world problems. This comprehensive and timely book offers a unique and essential reference guide for policymakers, funding bodies, researchers, technology developers and managers, end users, carers, clinicians, healthcare service providers, educators and students, helping them adopt and implement smart assisted living systems.




From Smart Homes to Smart Care


Book Description

Nowadays networks, microprocessors, memory chips, smart sensors and actuators are faster, cheaper and smaller than ever. They are becoming available anywhere, anytime. Current advances in such enabling technologies let foresee novel applications and services for improving the life of elderly and disabled people in their home and outside. These conference proceedings present the latest approaches and technical solutions in the area of smart homes, health telematics, and enabling technologies. The first chapter delves into the user perspective to ascertain real needs and design truly useful services. The following chapter explores the enabling technology. Distributed sensors, smart devices and networks appear as the nuts and bolts compulsory to build up smart homes. Chapter three looks at the realization of smart homes. Pervasive computing is emerging as one of the key approaches to organize computations within smart homes. The fourth chapter addresses the issue of using smart home features to design and deliver smart care services to persons with disabilities and elderly people. Finally Chapter five outlines standardization efforts and practical and industrial experiences. ICOST aims at creating an active research community dedicated to explore how smart homes in particular and health telematics in general can foster independent living and an enhanced life style for elderly and disabled people. On the one hand, smart homes are augmented environments with embedded computers, information appliances and multi-modal sensors allowing people to perform tasks efficiently by offering unprecedented levels of access to information and assistance from computer. On the other hand, health telematics makes the most of networks and telecommunications to propose health services, expertise and information at distance.




Towards Energy Smart Homes


Book Description

This book exemplifies how smart buildings have a crucial role to play for the future of energy. The book investigates what already exists in regards to technologies, approaches and solutions both with a scientific and technological point of view. The authors cover solutions for mirroring and tracing human activities, optimal strategies to configure home settings, and generating explanations and persuasive dashboards to get occupants better committed in their home energy managements. Solutions are adapted from the fields of Internet of Things, physical modeling, optimization, machine learning and applied artificial intelligence. Practical applications are given throughout.




Smart Home Technologies and Services for Geriatric Rehabilitation


Book Description

Smart Home Technologies and Services for Geriatric Rehabilitation provides a toolbox for healthcare stakeholders involved in decision-making for the design, development and implementation of smart home solutions. The book provides an in-depth look at the field of smart homes with readers from both research and practice in mind. It addresses the roles and contributions of smart home technologies and services in supporting geriatric rehabilitation and discusses the challenges of current practice and future innovation, especially with wireless technology and 5G advancements. This reference offers advice on how to implement solutions in the home, and how to framework the modalities of modifying and measuring responses to rehabilitation interventions in geriatric populations. Acceptability, usability and adherence are all considered. Content coverage includes how to navigate policies, regulations, standards and how to build business models. The book's editorial team is multidisciplinary, multisectoral, and from very different regions of the world, thus ensuring a comprehensive scope and global approach. - Offers an overview on the state-of-the-art, advanced technologies used in home healthcare to improve patient safety and care - Explores the challenges of current practices and discusses new perspectives for future innovations in geriatric rehabilitation services - Combines the technical aspects of computer science and technology design with the practical aspects of care giving




Smart Home Systems


Book Description

Smart homes are intelligent environments that interact dynamically and respond readily in an adaptive manner to the needs of the occupants and changes in the ambient conditions. The realization of systems that support the smart homes concept requires integration of technologies from different fields. Among the challenges that the designers face is to make all the components of the system interact in a seamless, reliable and secure manner. Another major challenge is to design the smart home in a way that takes into account the way humans live and interact. This later aspect requires input from the humanities and social sciences fields. The need for input from diverse fields of knowledge reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the research and development effort required to realize smart homes that are acceptable to the general public. The applications that can be supported by a smart home are very wide and their degree of sophistication depends on the underlying technology used. Some of the application areas include monitoring and control of appliances, security, telemedicine, entertainment, location based services, care for children and the elderly... etc. This book consists of eleven chapters that cover various aspects of smart home systems.




Smart Homes and Beyond


Book Description

The thought behind this publication is to continue to develop an active research community dedicated to explore how Smart Homes and Health Telematics can foster independent living and offer an enhanced quality of life for ageing and disabled people. As we begin to witness the effects of changing demographics on today’s society we begin to appreciate that the increase in the number of elderly and in the prevalence of those suffering from chronic disease and disabilities are likely to further increase in the next two to three decades. To react to the needs of this cohort to provide an environment within which the people can reside for as long as possible, whilst maintaining their quality of life and independence, is a widespread concern for all. As such, there is real benefit to further investigate the role of technologies to address these changes and subsequently offer practical solutions to support independent living. The editors feel that within the realms of Smart Homes and Health Telematics real, affordable and useful services can be developed which will have the necessary underlying technological and service delivery infrastructures to allow seamless integration into existing care delivery paradigms. The introduction of technology can provide a positive impact. However, it is necessary to avoid any detrimental effects if reliance upon technology within the home environment becomes so great that people will not leave their own home in fear of losing the support once outside of the home, or its close proximity. This publication focuses on promoting personal autonomy and extending the quality of life by considering including smart services inside and outside of the home.