A review of smart homes - Present state and future challenges

International journal of telemedicine and applications, 2011

The need for high-quality out-of-hospital healthcare is a known socioeconomic problem. Exploiting ICT's evolution, ad-hoc telemedicine solutions have been proposed in the past. Integrating such ad-hoc solutions in order to cost-effectively support the entire healthcare cycle is still a research challenge. In order to handle the heterogeneity of relevant information and to overcome the fragmentation of out-of-hospital instrumentation in person-centric healthcare systems, a shared and open source interoperability component can be adopted, which is ontology driven and based on the semantic web data model. The feasibility and the advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by presenting the use case of real-time monitoring of patients' health and their environmental context.

Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, 2012

Health Smart Homes are nowadays a very explored research area due to the needs for automation and telemedicine to support people in loss of autonomy and also due to the evolution of the technology that led in cheap and efficient sensors. However, collecting data in this area is still very challenging. As a consequence, many studies can not be validated on real data. In this paper, we present two realistic datasets acquired in a fully equipped Health Smart Home. The first is related to distress detection from speech (450 recorded sentences) and involved 10 participants, the second involved 15 participants who were performing several instances of seven activities of daily living (16 hours of multimodal data).

International Journal of E-Health and Medical Communications, 2011

One of the greatest challenges in Ambient Assisted Living is to design health smart homes that anticipate the needs of its inhabitant while maintaining their safety and comfort. It is thus essential to ease the interaction with the smart home through systems that naturally react to voice command using microphones rather than tactile interfaces. However, efficient audio analysis in such noisy environment is a challenging task. In this paper, a real-time audio analysis system, the AuditHIS system, devoted to audio analysis in smart home environment is presented. AuditHIS has been tested thought three experiments carried out in a smart home that are detailed. The results show the difficulty of the task and serve as basis to discuss the stakes and the challenges of this promising technology in the domain of AAL.

Sensors, 2012

This paper presents the implementation of a smart environment that employs Ambient Intelligence technologies in order to augment a typical hospital room with smart features that assist both patients and medical staff. In this environment various wireless and wired sensor technologies have been integrated, allowing the patient to control the environment and interact with the hospital facilities, while a clinically oriented interface allows for vital sign monitoring. The developed applications are presented both from a patient's and a doctor's perspective, offering different services depending on the user's role. The results of the evaluation process illustrate the need for such a service, leading to important conclusions about the usefulness and crucial role of AmI in health care.

Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 2014

Smart homes will be a key component of smart grids which can make significant contributions to Europe's transition to a low-carbon energy system. A growing literature on smart meters and demand side programmes focuses on the energy consumption and management services that smart homes offer. However, they can deliver much broader types of services, including assisted living, health and security. By including these non-energy aspects, this paper reveals differences in perceptions of smart homes in a cross-country comparative context to inform the delivery of smart home services. Public perceptions on the role of utilities and government in particular are important factors to be taken into account. The research highlights that policies should leave all paths open due to due to differences in householder preferences and acceptance of smart homes. Further implications for service delivery and planning are highlighted, calling for more interdisciplinary research in this area.

2013

This paper presents a telemetry system used in a combined trilateration method for the precise indoor localization of the elderly who need health monitoring. The system is based on the association of two wireless technologies: ultrasonic and 802.15.4. The use of the 802.15.4 RF signal gives the reference starting time of the ultrasonic emission (time difference of arrival method). A time of flight measurement of the ultrasonic pulses provides the distances between the mobile node and three anchor points. These distance measurements are then used to locate the mobile node using the trilateration method with an accuracy of a few centimetres. The originality of our work lies in embedding the mobile node in clothes. The system is embedded in clothes in two ways: on a shoe in order to form a -smart‖ shoe and in a hat in order to form a -smart‖ hat. Both accessories allow movements, gait speed and distance covered to be monitored for health applications. Experiments in a test room are presented to show the effectiveness of our system.

Proceedings of the 1st Augmented Human International Conference on - AH '10, 2010

In this paper, we describe an intelligent graphical user interface (IGUI) and a User Application Interface (UAI) tailored to Brain Computer Interface (BCI) interaction, designed for people with severe communication needs. The IGUI has three components; a two way interface for communication with BCI2000 concerning user events and event handling; an interface to user applications concerning the passing of user commands and associated device identifiers, and the receiving of notification of device status; and an interface to an extensible mark-up language (xml) file containing menu content definitions. The interface has achieved control of domotic applications. The architecture however permits control of more complex 'smart' environments and could be extended further for entertainment by interacting with media devices. Using components of the electroencephalogram (EEG) to mediate expression is also technically possible, but is much more speculative, and without proven efficacy. The IGUI-BCI approach described could potentially find wider use in the augmentation of the general population, to provide alternative computer interaction, an additional control channel and experimental leisure activities.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

The objective of AAL and home care is a better care for frail individuals (elderly chronic and disabled patients) in a home care setting. To improve this kind of care means to allow the citizens to stay at home as long as possible, delaying the institutionalization of people, possibly avoiding it for a high percentage of them. Recent development in ICT shows that it is almost impossible to design and implement an AAL system as fixed to certain hardware, operating system, and infrastructure. Thus it is necessary to develop such architectures that will be easily extensible and modifiable. We will discuss such approaches in the paper.

Architectural Science Review, 2015

Smart homes are residences equipped innovative technologies: sensors, wired and wireless networks, actuators and intelligent systems. The smart home concept has developed rapidly since the early 1990s. Yet, after almost more than two decades, the prevalence of smart homes is still limited and has not taken off on a large scale even though many people consider it to constitute 'future living'. This review article aims to bridge the knowledge gap between the disciplines of computing, architecture and health care, in order to provide architects, designers and planners with an integrative overview of the smart home, its technologies, objectives, problems and obstacles, including suggestions for overcoming these obstacles and the possible implications on our future living.

Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing, 2013

Wearable health monitoring is an emerging technology for continuous monitoring of vital signs including the electrocardiogram (ECG). This signal is widely adopted to diagnose and assess major health risks and chronic cardiac diseases. This paper focuses on reviewing wearable ECG monitoring systems in the form of wireless, mobile and remote technologies related to older adults. Furthermore, the efficiency, user acceptability, strategies and recommendations on improving current ECG monitoring systems with an overview of the design and modelling are presented. In this paper, over 120 ECG monitoring systems were reviewed and classified into smart wearable, wireless, mobile ECG monitoring systems with related signal processing algorithms. The results of the review suggest that most research in wearable ECG monitoring systems focus on the older adults and this technology has been adopted in aged care facilitates. Moreover, it is shown that how mobile telemedicine systems have evolved and how advances in wearable wireless textilebased systems could ensure better quality of healthcare delivery. The main drawbacks of deployed ECG monitoring systems including imposed limitations on patients, short battery life, lack of user acceptability and medical professional's feedback, and lack of security and privacy of essential data have been also discussed.

Applied Intelligence, 2012

A fundamental problem for disabled or elderly people is to manage their homes while carrying out an almost normal life, which implies using and interacting with a number of home devices. Recent studies in smart homes have proposed methods to use a laser pointer for interacting with home devices, which represents a more user-friendly and less expensive home device control environment. However, detecting the laser spot on the original non-filtered images, using standard and non-expensive cameras, and considering real home environments with varying conditions, is currently an open problem.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Technological innovations, varying from ubiquitous computing, intelligent appliances, telecommunication, robotics, to wearable sensors, enable new Smart Home (SH) applications. More and more academic publications reporting on experiments on SH can be found. A comprehensive clustering of concepts and approaches is largely missing. Based on an extensive review of SH literature, this paper proposes a framework that decomposes the SH research into four domains and 15 sub-domains. The framework is applied to visualize the state of the art of SH research, and to outline future challenges. The framework helps researchers to identify gaps in SH research.

Information Systems Frontiers, 2013

One of the first steps in innovation projects and entrepreneurial initiative involves formulating a Business Model (BM) that describes the value creation, delivery and capturing logic of a business idea. However, when formulating a BM for networked enterprises, the alignment of the collective BM, supporting the joint service or product on offer, and the underlying operational processes of the networked businesses, need to be taken into account. This paper analyses the concept of Business Model Alignment (BMA) based on qualitative case studies of two Smart Living projects in Finland and China. To begin with, a Business Model framework (STOF) is applied to describe the high-level BM. Next, the Value, Information and Process (VIP) framework is applied to analyse BMA. The case studies show that an analytical framework, such as the VIP model, helps reveal the hurdles that may undermine BMA and, as a result, obstruct BM implementation. This paper contributes to existing BM literature by identifying the steps that are necessary to move from an abstract, often strategy-driven BM, of collaborating enterprises towards an aligned BM that can be implemented. This paper also contributes to theory formation by identifying the issues that play a role in achieving BMA.

IoT and Smart Home Automation [Working Title]

Hospitals and nursing care homes are facing severe challenges such as lack of skilled workforces and cost explosion, among others. Especially, the western healthcare systems are headed over a cliff. German nursing care houses, hospitals, and government are working hard on solutions to overcome the crucial workforce's crises. Therefore, they are planning to hire nursing-workforces from abroad. They would also like to motivate families with monetary incentives, such as taxreduction, if they can care for their elderly and/or dementia family members at home. However, caring for a sick person at home is challenging for a working family member especially in the case the patient requests around-the-clock nursing care since elderly with cognitive impairments, people with physical disabilities, and people with dementia need (medical) assistance around the clock. The present study reveals an increasing tendency for family members to care for their sick family member at home despite the challenges and issues faced like the lack of time to intensively care for the sick person due to today's family lifestyle, challenging employment market, financial constraints, etc. The study reported in this chapter aims at providing family members willing to care for their sick member at home as long as possible with smart home automation enabled Patient@Home solution to effectively and efficiently care for their sick member despite working full time. People living in nursing care homes can also take benefit of the proposed system. Evidence shows the potential of the proposed system to effectively and efficiently assist in caring for people requesting nursing care around the clock. Though the health-related quality of life is positively impacted, patient's satisfaction is increased (better quality of experience).

Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 2018

Smart homes play a strategic role for improving life quality of people, enabling to monitor people at home with numerous intelligent devices. Sensors can be installed to provide a continuous assistance without limiting the resident's daily routine, giving her/him greater comfort, well-being and safety. This paper is based on the development of domestic technological solutions to improve the life quality of citizens and monitor the users and the domestic environment, based on features extracted from the collected data. The proposed smart sensing architecture is based on an integrated sensor network to monitor the user and the environment to derive information about the user's behavior and her/his health status. The proposed platform includes biomedical, wearable, and unobtrusive sensors for monitoring user's physiological parameters and home automation sensors to obtain information about her/his environment. The sensor network stores the heterogeneous data both locally an...

Journal of Assistive Technologies, 2012

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Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 2017

The aim of this paper is to present the main results of HDOMO, an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) project that involved 16 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and 2 research institutes. The objective of the project was to create an autonomous and automated domestic environment, primarily for elderly people and people with physical and motor disabilities. A known and familiar environment should help users in their daily activities and it should act as a virtual caregiver by calling, if necessary, relief efforts. Substantially, the aim of the project is to simplify the life of people in need of support, while keeping them autonomous in their private environment. From a technical point of view, the project provides the use of different Smart Objects (SOs), able to communicate among each other, in a cloud base infrastructure, and with the assisted users and their caregivers, in a perspective of interoperability and standardization of devices, usability and effectiveness of alarm systems. ...

Indoor and Built Environment, 2012

In this work, we present a human activity recognition (HAR) system for smart homes utilizing depth silhouettes and  transformation. Previous utilization of  transformation on binary silhouettes of human activities showed its usefulness in HAR. However the binary silhouettes only provide the shape information of activities. In this work, we utilize  transformation on depth silhouettes such that the depth information of human body parts can be used in HAR in addition to the shape information. In  transformation, a 2D directional shape feature map is computed first through Radon transform of each depth silhouette, and then a 1D feature profile, that is translation and scaling invariant, gets computed through  transform. Then to a set of the  transformed profiles of various activities, we apply Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to extract prominent activity features which are more compact and robust. Finally, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are used to train and recognize daily home activities. Our results show 96.55% in the mean recognition rate over ten typical home activities whereas the same system utilizing binary silhouettes achieves only 85.75%. Our system should be useful as a smart HAR system for smart homes.

Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 2018

We present an Arduino-based automation system to control the streetlights based on solar rays and object's detection. We aim to design various systems to achieve the desired operations, which no longer require time-consuming manual switching of the streetlights. The proposed work is accomplished by using an Arduino microcontroller, a light dependent resistor (LDR) and infrared-sensors while, two main contributions are presented in this work. Firstly, we show that the streetlights can be controlled based on the night and object's detection. In which the streetlights automatically turn to DIM state at night-time and turn to HIGH state on object's detection, while during day-time the streetlights will remain OFF. Secondly, the proposed automated system is further extended to skip the DIM condition at night time, and streetlights turn ON based on the objects' detection only. In addition, an automatic door system is introduced to improve the safety measurements, and most ...

International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, 2012

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to report an inter-disciplinary experience in building a context-aware system that provides adapted functionalities to inhabitants of a smart home. The paper focuses on the management of uncertainty that is intrinsic to pervasive computing systems. Design/methodology/approach-The paper presents the principles that characterize the context-aware architecture: the acceptability-driven design, where privacy and acceptability are favored; the awareness of the gap between the reality of human activity and the capabilities of the capture process; the step-by-step abstraction of contextual information; the management of uncertainty imprecision and ignorance at individual-and cross-layer levels. The paper presents the principles and describes the system architecture, focusing on the management of uncertainty. Findings-The authors built a layered architecture that manages and propagates uncertainty, imprecision and ignorance, allowing the recognition of ambiguous contexts and the provision of adapted functionalities. The paper illustrates this architecture and an application leveraging it. Research limitations/implications-Future work will investigate the exploitation of feedback mechanisms and the recognition of context dynamics. These improvements will allow resolving inconsistencies and ambiguities in context information and improving the provision of functionalities in situations characterized by temporal developments. Practical implications-The research aims at realizing the long-term vision of smart homes that provide adapted functionalities to inhabitants: saving energy and improving comfort and quality of domestic life. Originality/value-The paper introduces some principles that can be considered when designing a context-aware system and presents an architecture that follows those principles. Researchers in the smart home and pervasive computing domains may consider this paper when designing their context-aware architectures.

Applied Sciences

Smart environments have proven very supportive to the improvement of the performance of people in different workplaces. Plenty of applications have been introduced spanning different settings including healthcare, ambient assisted living, homes, offices, and manufacturing environment, etc. However, subjectivity and ambiguity prevail in the majority of research, and still, up to date, rare approaches found quantitatively and objectively constructing or assessing the impact of smart enabling technologies on the performance of the subject environment. Further, no approaches have considered optimizing the adoption of those smart technologies with respect to objectives achievement. This article presents a novel optimization methodology for designing a smart workplace environment in conditions of ambiguity or fuzziness. The methodology begins with defining and weighing the overall goals and objectives of the workplace. The Prometthe multi-criterion decision-making technique is used to wei...

2020

Smart thermostats may provide up to 10% savings in residential thermal energy use without loss of comfort, yet their diffusion has typically been slow. To better understand adoption of these devices, we conducted an online survey with approximately 5,500 respondents from eight European countries that included both a discrete choice experiment (DCE) and stated past adoption of smart thermostats. The results we obtained by estimating mixed logit models suggest that households value heating cost savings, remote temperature control, the display of changes in energy consumption, and recommendations by experts, albeit with substantial heterogeneity across countries; in comparison, subsidies are positively valued in all countries except for Germany and Spain, and recommendations by energy providers in all countries except Poland where they are negatively valued. Further, the findings provide evidence that consumer innovativeness reinforces the acceptance of technical attributes (heating co...

Electronics

The last decade has witnessed a significant reduction in prices and an increased performance of electronic components, coupled with the influence of the shift towards the generation of open resources, both in terms of knowledge (open access), programs (open-source software), and components (open hardware). This situation has produced different effects in today’s society, among which is the empowerment of citizens, called makers, who are themselves able to generate citizen science or build assembly developments. Situated in the context described above, the current study follows a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach. In this way, it attempts to define a conceptual design of an Internet of Things (IoT) node, which is reproducible at both physical and behavioral levels, to build IoT nodes which can cover any scenario. To test this conceptual design, this study proposes a sensorization node to monitor meteorological phenomena. The node is called SEnviro (node) and features different improvemen...

Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services

While the population is aging the role of information and communication technology (ICT) has grown in elderly care. This development has brought versatile ICT-related supportive systems to professionals and laymen working with aging people. The current study analyzed how professionals in elderly care perceived their workflow challenges before new ICT is developed and implemented to support their work. The results of this study are set to inform the design of a novel ICT system for a sheltered care home.

Sustainability

This paper aims to propose a conceptual model to create and select smart home conceptions from the user-centric and sustainable perspective, using the Design Thinking approach. Although considerable research has been devoted to smart homes in the last two decades, gaps are evident in current research concerning the creation and selection of smart home conceptions from both user-centric and sustainable perspectives. A systematic literature review covering the period 2000–2020 indicated that Design Thinking (DT) has rarely been exploited in smart home projects. The applicability of the proposed model could be demonstrated in the context of a smart home project in Brazil (NO.V.A. Project) conducted by an energy distribution player in this country in cooperation with two local universities and other institutional partners. The replication of this approach in smart home projects will allow decision-makers and project managers to place future residents at the center of the smart home desi...

International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 2016

Although the Semantic Web data standards are established, ontology-based applications built on the standards are relatively limited. This is partly due to high learning curve and efforts demanded in building ontology-based Semantic Web applications. In this paper, we describe an ontology application management (OAM) framework that aims to simplify creation and adoption of ontology-based application that is based on the Semantic Web technology. OAM introduces an intermediate layer between user application and programming and development environment in order to support ontology-based data publishing and access, abstraction and interoperability. The framework focuses on providing reusable and configurable data and application templates, which allow the users to create the applications without programming skill required. Three forms of templates are introduced: database to ontology mapping configuration, recommendation rule and application templates. We describe two case studies that ad...

Operation of Smart Homes

Research in smart homes is still quite recent; however, there is no doubt that it will become a pervasive research topic in the near future. This chapter analyzes the whole research production on smart homes indexed in the Scopus database from 1985 to 2019, yielding a total of 11,000 studies. One of the goals of this chapter is to identify the main countries and institutions that have published on this topic and what their interest has been throughout the time. Four out of 116 countries stand out in this field, namely China, USA, India, and South Korea. In terms of the main institutions, the three with the highest scientific output are Ulster University

2018

Given the aging of the population in most Western countries, the challenges to support the daily activities of the aging population are of interest to ergonomists. The use of innovative technologies to support older people when they encounter difficulties in carrying out their daily activities is already possible. The purpose of this presentation is to provide insights into what is known to date in the use of assistive technologies for an aging population. To do this, a synthesis of knowledge has been realized. Peer reviewed papers of good scientific quality was reviewed (n = 39). Considering the development of ergonomically-based technology products, a noticeable difference between the design and usage objectives has been noted. This implies that stakeholders, such as ergonomists, therapists do not use technology in the same direction for which it was designed. In addition, it is possible to note that the least explored objectives are those related to the concept of development and...

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, 2017

Although scarce, previous work on the application of machine learning and data mining techniques on large corpora of astronomical data has produced promising results. For example, on the task of detecting so-called Kepler objects of interest (KOIs), a range of di erent 'o the shelf' classi ers has demonstrated outstanding performance. ese rather preliminary research e orts motivate further exploration of this data domain. In the present work we focus on the analysis of threshold crossing events (TCEs) extracted from photometric data acquired by the Kepler spacecra. We show that the task of classifying TCEs as being e ected by actual planetary transits as opposed to confounding astrophysical phenomena is signi cantly more challenging than that of KOI detection, with di erent classi ers exhibiting vastly di erent performances. Nevertheless, the best performing classi er type, the random forest, achieved excellent accuracy, correctly predicting in approximately 96% of the cases. Our results and analysis should illuminate further e orts into the development of more sophisticated, automatic techniques, and encourage additional work in the area.

Applied Sciences, 2018

Every single instant a person generates a large amount of information that somehow is lost. This information can assume a large diversity of means, such as an oral word, a sneeze, an increase in heartbeat or even facial expressions. We present a model which promotes the well-being of the elderly in their homes. The general idea behind the model is that every single experience may mean something, and therefore may be recorded, measured and even have adequate responses. There is no device that provides a more natural interaction than a human body and every one of us, sends and receives useful information, which sometimes gets lost. Trends show that the future will be filled with pervasive IoT devices, present in most aspects of human life's. In this we focus on which aspects are more important for the well-being of a person and which devices, technologies and interactions may be used to collect data directly from users and measure their physiological and emotional responses. Even though not all the technologies presented in this article are yet mainstream, they have been evolving very rapidly and evidence makes us believe that the efficiency of this approach will be closely related to their advances.

Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Healthy and Active Aging, 2016

To address aging challenges, we examine the concept of smart living and its applications for the elderly. Smart living refers to improving quality of life by transforming environments to become more intelligent and adaptable to users. In this paper, we discuss how smart living applications can help to address the needs of the elderly, as well as the design and human-computer interaction considerations for such applications.

Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems - DIS '17 Companion, 2017

Personal data is increasingly important in our lives. We use personal data to quantify our behaviour, through health apps or for 'personal branding' and we are also increasingly forced to part with our data to access services. With a proliferation of embedded sensors, the built environment is playing a key role in this developing use of data, even though this remains relatively hidden. Buildings are sites for the capture of personal data, such as ID card gateways or wifi hotspots. This data is used to adapt buildings to people's behaviour, and increasingly, organisations use this data to understand how buildings are occupied and how communities develop. This workshop will bring together a community of researchers and practitioners interested in personal informatics and the design of interactive buildings and environments to foster critical discussion on the future role of personal data in interactions with the built environment.

MRS Energy & Sustainability, 2017

Society is facing drastic environmental and geopolitical impacts from climate change. There is evidence for significant acceleration of global warming, and experts warn of a point of no return calling for CO 2 emissions to be stabilized. To turn the world's energy infrastructure and systems around in time before the most detrimental climate change effects can no longer be undone, 1 passionate policy makers must meet innovative engineers and entrepreneurs because the implementation of innovative solutions relies heavily on both the economic and the political landscape. First off, climate change must be perceived as a problem to create the necessary political pressure needed for policy changes. But who makes the public opinion of global warming? At the end of the 1980s, the greenhouse effect made frontline news following a testimony at a U.S. senate climate hearing. 2 Despite the broad consensus of international experts on climate change, there was a strong, well-organized opposition (thinktanks, scientists with contrary positions) which began to question the mere existence of climate change, effectively stopping all efforts of the US government to impose CO 2 emission regulations for a decade. Many of these activities were directly supported by the fossil fuel industry, which has a strong interest in playing down the effects of climate change. With the current

International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems, 2011

In this paper, the authors propose software architecture to monitor elderly or dependent people in their own house. Many studies have been done on hardware aspects resulting in operational products, but there is a lack of adaptive algorithms to handle all the data generated by these products due to data being distributed and heterogeneous in a large scale environment. The authors propose a multi-agent classification method to collect and to aggregate data about activity, movements, and physiological information of the monitored people. Data generated at this local level are communicated and adjusted between agents to obtain a set of patterns. This data is dynamic; the system has to store the built patterns and has to create new patterns when new data is available. Therefore, the system is adaptive and can be spread on a large scale. Generated data is used at a local level, for example to raise an alert, but also to evaluate global risks. This paper presents specification choices and...

Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, 2017

In this paper, we describe a human posture classification and a falling detector module suitable for smart homes and assisted living solutions. The system uses a neural network that processes the human joints produced by a skeleton tracker using the depth streams of an RGB-D sensor. The neural network is able to recognize standing, sitting and lying postures. Using only the depth maps from the sensor, the system can work in poor light conditions and guarantees the privacy of the person. The neural network is trained with a dataset produced with the Kinect tracker, but it is also tested with a different human tracker (NiTE). In particular, the aim of this work is to analyse the behaviour of the neural network even when the position of the extracted joints is not reliable and the provided skeleton is confused. Real-time tests have been carried out covering the whole operative range of the sensor (up to 3.5 meters). Experimental results have shown an overall accuracy of 98.3% using the NiTE tracker for the falling tests, with the worst accuracy of 97.5%.

Indoor and Built Environment, 2013

Technological innovations, from ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, telecommunication to intelligent appliances and robotics, bring new possibilities to the Smart Home domain, which has led to an increase in the number of academic publications in this domain. To date, no comprehensive overview and clustering of the core concepts used in these publications have been produced. Based on an extensive review of existing literature on the Smart Home, this paper visualizes the state of the art in the Smart Home research in a systematic way and outlines future research challenges. To do so, a business model framework is applied that helps researchers place their work within a broader context and identify gaps in the existing body of knowledge in this area. In order to move from the exploration towards the exploitation of Smart Home concepts, it is essential to contribute to a coherent body of knowledge that not only is technology driven, as it is the case now, but also pay attention to...

Information, 2017

The conjunction of wireless computing, ubiquitous Internet access, and the miniaturisation of sensors have opened the door for technological applications that can monitor health and well-being outside of formal healthcare systems. The health-related Internet of Things (H-IoT) increasingly plays a key role in health management by providing real-time tele-monitoring of patients, testing of treatments, actuation of medical devices, and fitness and well-being monitoring. Given its numerous applications and proposed benefits, adoption by medical and social care institutions and consumers may be rapid. However, a host of ethical concerns are also raised that must be addressed. The inherent sensitivity of health-related data being generated and latent risks of Internet-enabled devices pose serious challenges. Users, already in a vulnerable position as patients, face a seemingly impossible task to retain control over their data due to the scale, scope and complexity of systems that create, aggregate, and analyse personal health data. In response, the H-IoT must be designed to be technologically robust and scientifically reliable, while also remaining ethically responsible, trustworthy, and respectful of user rights and interests. To assist developers of the H-IoT, this paper describes nine principles and nine guidelines for ethical design of H-IoT devices and data protocols.

Sensors, 2019

Most expert projections indicate that in 2030, there will be over one billion people aged 60 or over. The vast majority of them prefer to spend their last years at home, and almost a third of them live alone. This creates a growing need for technology-based solutions capable of helping older people to live independently in their places. Despite the wealth of solutions proposed for this general problem, there are very few support systems that can be reproduced on a larger scale. In this study, we propose a method to monitor the activity of the elderly living alone and detect deviations from the previous activity patterns based on the idea that the residential living environment can be modeled as a collection of behaviorally significant places located arbitrarily in a generic space. Then we use virtual pheromones—a concept defined in our previous work—to create images of the pheromone distribution maps, which describe the spatiotemporal evolution of the interactions between the user a...

Internet Research, 2019

Purpose The wider use of Internet of Things (IoT) makes it possible to create smart cities. The purpose of this paper is to identify key IoT challenges and understand the relationship between these challenges to support the development of smart cities. Design/methodology/approach Challenges were identified using literature review, and prioritised and elaborated by experts. The contextual interactions between the identified challenges and their importance were determined using Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM). To interrelate the identified challenges and promote IoT in the context of smart cities, the dynamics of interactions of these challenges were analysed using an integrated Matrice d’Impacts Croisés Multiplication Appliqués à un Classement (MICMAC)-ISM approach. MICMAC is a structured approach to categorise variables according to their driving power and dependence. Findings Security and privacy, business models, data quality, scalability, complexity and governance were fo...

The Knowledge Engineering Review, 2015

Ambient intelligence (AmI) proposes pervasive information systems composed of autonomous agents embedded within the environment who, in orchestration, complement human activity in an intelligent manner. As such, it is an interesting and challenging application area for many computer science fields and approaches. A critical issue in such application scenarios is that the agents must be able to acquire, exchange, and evaluate knowledge about the environment, its users, and their activities. Knowledge populated between the agents in such systems may be contextually dependent, ambiguous, and incomplete. Conflicts may thus naturally arise, that need to be dealt with by the agents in an autonomous way. In this survey, we relate AmI to the area of knowledge representation and reasoning (KR), where conflict resolution has been studied for a long time. We take a look at a number of KR approaches that may be applied: context modelling, multi-context systems, belief revision, ontology evoluti...

Sensors, 2017

The consistent growth in human life expectancy during the recent years has driven governments and private organizations to increase the efforts in caring for the eldest segment of the population. These institutions have built hospitals and retirement homes that have been rapidly overfilled, making their associated maintenance and operating costs prohibitive. The latest advances in technology and communications envisage new ways to monitor those people with special needs at their own home, increasing their quality of life in a cost-affordable way. The purpose of this paper is to present an Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) platform able to analyze, identify, and detect specific acoustic events happening in daily life environments, which enables the medic staff to remotely track the status of every patient in real-time. Additionally, this tele-care proposal is validated through a proof-of-concept experiment that takes benefit of the capabilities of the NVIDIA Graphical Processing Unit running on a Jetson TK1 board to locally detect acoustic events. Conducted experiments demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by reaching an overall accuracy of 82% when identifying a set of 14 indoor environment events related to the domestic surveillance and patients' behaviour monitoring field. Obtained results encourage practitioners to keep working in this direction, and enable health care providers to remotely track the status of their patients in real-time with non-invasive methods.

Journal of Sensors, 2016

Wearable sensor systems will soon become part of the available medical tools for remote and long term physiological monitoring. However, the set of variables involved in the performance of these systems are usually antagonistic, and therefore the design of usable wearable systems in real clinical applications entails a number of challenges that have to be addressed first. This paper describes a method to optimise the design of these systems for the specific application of cardiac monitoring. The method proposed is based on the selection of a subset of 5 design variables, sensor contact, location, and rotation, signal correlation, and patient comfort, and 2 objective functions, functionality and wearability. These variables are optimised using linear and nonlinear models to maximise those objective functions simultaneously. The methodology described and the results achieved demonstrate that it is possible to find an optimal solution and therefore overcome most of the design barriers ...

Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks, 2017

Smart Houses are a prominent field of research referring to environments adapted to assist people in their everyday life. Older people and people with disabilities would benefit the most from the use of Smart Houses because they provide the opportunity for them to stay in their home for as long as possible. In this review, the developments achieved in the field of Smart Houses for the last 16 years are described. The concept of Smart Houses, the most used analysis methods, and current challenges in Smart Houses are presented. A brief introduction of the analysis methods is given, and their implementation is also reported.

Buildings

South Korea is expected to become a super-aged society by 2025, when more than 20% of its population will be aged 65 and over. One possible solution for minimizing the socioeconomic burden posed by this aging trend is smart home technology, which can be used to support older adults’ daily routines. In this study, the aim is to suggest the direction of development on smart home technology and products to enhance our understanding of service and item needs for the optimal commercialization of smart homes for users. A living lab was set up to research the experience of using smart home technology in real environments. To obtain intuitive and specific evaluations, visitors of varying ages tested each item and living space and responded to a five-point scale questionnaire on importance (recognition) and performance (satisfaction). The recognition and satisfaction for each smart home item or service were then evaluated using basic statistical analysis, importance–performance analysis, and...

Sensors, 2017

A large number of the population around the world suffers from various disabilities. Disabilities affect not only children but also adults of different professions. Smart technology can assist the disabled population and lead to a comfortable life in an enhanced living environment (ELE). In this paper, we propose an effective voice pathology assessment system that works in a smart home framework. The proposed system takes input from various sensors, and processes the acquired voice signals and electroglottography (EGG) signals. Co-occurrence matrices in different directions and neighborhoods from the spectrograms of these signals were obtained. Several features such as energy, entropy, contrast, and homogeneity from these matrices were calculated and fed into a Gaussian mixture model-based classifier. Experiments were performed with a publicly available database, namely, the Saarbrucken voice database. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system in light of its high accuracy and speed. The proposed system can be extended to assess other disabilities in an ELE.

Archives of Public Health, 2014

Background: Innovations in mobile and electronic healthcare are revolutionizing the involvement of both doctors and patients in the modern healthcare system by extending the capabilities of physiological monitoring devices. Despite significant progress within the monitoring device industry, the widespread integration of this technology into medical practice remains limited. The purpose of this review is to summarize the developments and clinical utility of smart wearable body sensors. Methods: We reviewed the literature for connected device, sensor, trackers, telemonitoring, wireless technology and real time home tracking devices and their application for clinicians. Results: Smart wearable sensors are effective and reliable for preventative methods in many different facets of medicine such as, cardiopulmonary, vascular, endocrine, neurological function and rehabilitation medicine. These sensors have also been shown to be accurate and useful for perioperative monitoring and rehabilitation medicine. Conclusion: Although these devices have been shown to be accurate and have clinical utility, they continue to be underutilized in the healthcare industry. Incorporating smart wearable sensors into routine care of patients could augment physician-patient relationships, increase the autonomy and involvement of patients in regards to their healthcare and will provide for novel remote monitoring techniques which will revolutionize healthcare management and spending.

Studies in Big Data, 2017

Driven by the advances in hardware and software technologies, the term Internet of things has emerged as a worldwide framework of 'smart' internet-based interconnected electronic devices through web having a significant impact in the betterment of our traditional living style. The use of these web connected embedded devices, as Information and communication technologies for reshaping modern cities, lead to the concept of smart cities. This chapter surveys the most important domains of smart cities and illustrates the recent research and development in them. After identifying critical areas, the chapter also highlights and discusses the issues and research gaps in recent technologies. Finally, it presents the opportunities and research directions in future advancements of intelligent cities.

Sustainability

Smart Technology is a quickly and constantly evolving concept; it has different applications that cover a wide range of areas, such as healthcare, education, business, agriculture, and manufacturing. An effective application of these technologies increases productivity and performance within complex systems. On one side, trends show a lack of appeal for rural environments as people prefer to move to cities, looking for better opportunities and lifestyles. On the other side, recent studies and reports show that the attractiveness of rural areas as places with opportunities is increasing. Sustainable solutions are needed to enhance development in the rural context, and technological innovation is expected to lead and support the stability for people and organizations in rural regions. While Smart City is progressively becoming a reality and a successful model for integrating Smart Technology into different aspects of everyday life, its effective application in a rural context accordin...

Sensors

With the growing interest in smart home environments and in providing seamless interactions with various smart devices, robust and reliable human activity recognition (HAR) systems are becoming essential. Such systems provide automated assistance to residents or to longitudinally monitor their daily activities for health and well-being assessments, as well as for tracking (long-term) behavior changes. These systems thus contribute towards an understanding of the health and continued well-being of residents. Smart homes are personalized settings where residents engage in everyday activities in their very own idiosyncratic ways. In order to provide a fully functional HAR system that requires minimal supervision, we provide a systematic analysis and a technical definition of the lifespan of activity recognition systems for smart homes. Such a designed lifespan provides for the different phases of building the HAR system, where these different phases are motivated by an application scen...

Frontiers in Psychology

IntroductionThe smart home has become a popular product, but with the development of the aging population, the differentiated characteristics of the elderly smart home products in terms of demand and use are becoming more and more significant. The existing smart products are complicated to operate and cumbersome to interact with, which increases the cognitive load of the elderly group and hinders the daily use and user experience feeling of the elderly. The purpose of this paper is to study the interface data information and interface visual design starting from hardware and software, interface interaction, to explore the better interface data information and interface visual design, and to output, a new prototype of the operating interface of smart home system for the elderly, so that the smart products can be better used by the elderly.MethodsThirty-two participants aged 55–75 were invited to conduct the test, and subjective evaluation was conducted at the end of the test. Through...

International journal of mathematics and computers in simulation, 2021

The paper deals with an implementation of unobtrusive sensors installed in home environment for continuous monitoring of functional-health parameters of the observed persons. A multi-tier architecture links sensory devices through sensor-data concentrators to a home server. Automated sensory measurements are supported by a concept of sensoractivated events, event-driven data transmission and processing by a dedicated application interface. Its logic and data structures are revealed. Examples of three typical execution scenarios are given and a short description depicts clinical installation of proposed system for testing purposes.

Universal Access in the Information Society, 2020

The majority of older people wish to live independently at home as long as possible despite having a range of age-related conditions including cognitive impairment. To facilitate this, there has been an extensive focus on exploring the capability of new technologies with limited success. This paper investigates whether MS Kinect (a motion-based sensing 3-D scanner device) within the MiiHome (My Intelligent Home) project in conjunction with other sensory data, machine learning and big data techniques can assist in the diagnosis and prognosis of cognitive impairment and hence prolong independent living. A pool of Kinect devices and various sensors powered by minicomputers providing internet connectivity are being installed in up to 200 homes. This enables continuous remote monitoring of elderly residents living alone. Passive and off-the-shelf sensor technologies were chosen to implement data acquisition specifically from sources that are part of the fabric of the homes, so that no ex...

JMIR Aging

Background Home health monitoring shows promise in improving health outcomes; however, navigating the literature remains challenging given the breadth of evidence. There is a need to summarize the effectiveness of monitoring across health domains and identify gaps in the literature. In addition, ethical and user-centered frameworks are important to maximize the acceptability of health monitoring technologies. Objective This review aimed to summarize the clinical evidence on home-based health monitoring through a scoping review and outline ethical and user concerns and discuss the challenges of the current user-oriented conceptual frameworks. Methods A total of 2 literature reviews were conducted. We conducted a scoping review of systematic reviews in Scopus, MEDLINE, Embase, and CINAHL in July 2021. We included reviews examining the effectiveness of home-based health monitoring in older adults. The exclusion criteria included reviews with no clinical outcomes and lack of monitoring ...

Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology, 2011

Revue Ouverte d'Intelligence Artificielle

Apport de l'intelligence artificielle dans la surveillance des personnes fragiles à domicile

Sensors, 2017

An aging population and human longevity is a global trend. Many developed countries are struggling with the yearly increasing healthcare cost that dominantly affects their economy. At the same time, people living with old adults suffering from a progressive brain disorder such as Alzheimer's disease are enduring even more stress and depression than those patients while caring for them. Accordingly, seniors' ability to live independently and comfortably in their current home for as long as possible has been crucial to reduce the societal cost for caregiving and thus give family members peace of mind, called 'aging in place' (AIP). In this paper we present a way of building AIP services using standard-based IoT platforms and heterogeneous IoT products. An AIP service platform is designed and created by combining previous standard-based IoT platforms in a collaborative way. A service composition tool is also created that allows people to create AIP services in an efficient way. To show practical usability of our proposed system, we choose a service scenario for medication compliance and implement a prototype service which could give old adults medication reminder appropriately at the right time (i.e., when it is time to need to take pills) through light and speaker at home but also wrist band and smartphone even outside the home.

Public Management Review, 2017

Precision governance is an administrative capacity in which policy decisions are enhanced with information about individual and collective preferences and contexts. We introduce the prospects for precision governance of natural hazards through the use of both big and individual data technologies, describing what is enabled and what concerns arise with their use. We ground our perspective with a topical focus on mitigating the health risks of high temperatures in the chronically hot setting of Phoenix, Arizona, USA. A study examining individually experienced temperature data provides compelling evidence that the transition towards data-driven precision governance will enhance hazard preparedness and response efforts.