Enabling affordable and efficiently deployed location based smart home systems

• Published in: Technology and health care Vol. 17; no. 3; pp. 221 - 235
• Main Authors: Kelly, Damian, McLoone, Sean, Dishongh, Terry
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands 2009
• Subjects: Activities of Daily Living; Aged; Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Computer Communication Networks; Equipment Design; Home Care Services; Housing for the Elderly; Humans; Monitoring, Ambulatory - economics; Monitoring, Ambulatory - instrumentation; Monitoring, Ambulatory - methods; Monitoring, Ambulatory - trends; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
• ISSN: 0928-7329; 1878-7401
• DOI: 10.3233/THC-2009-0549

With the obvious eldercare capabilities of smart environments it is a question of "when", rather than "if", these technologies will be routinely integrated into the design of future houses. In the meantime, health monitoring applications must be integrated into already complete home environments. However, there is significant effort involved in installing the hardware necessary to monitor the movements of an elder throughout an environment. Our work seeks to address the high infrastructure requirements of traditional location-based smart home systems by developing an extremely low infrastructure localisation technique. A study of the most efficient method of obtaining calibration data for an environment is conducted and different mobile devices are compared for localisation accuracy and cost trade-off. It is believed that these developments will contribute towards more efficiently deployed location-based smart home systems.