Introduction
The population of elderly people is increasing rapidly and more and more people have a hard time living an independant life.
By providing the elder generation with a smart home using ubiquitous computing, less health care is required and their lives can become more independant and enjoyable.
The purpose of this assignment is to create a physically modeled smart home environment using phidgets. The smart home is designed to help an elderly person Agda, 75 to live a more independant and healthy life. Agda suffers from poor eyesight and is too old to live alone without any help.
The smart home will include features like switching on/off the lights, opening and closing doors, helpind her find valuables and alert the hospital if she falls.
System description
The smart home that we are going to build will provide following features to Agda
- Turn on/off and dim the lights when she enters/exits the room.
- Open the door outside and inside the house without a key.
- Help her finding her valuables if she has lost them.
- Alert the hospital if she falls on the floor.
Scenario
Agda walks towards the bathroom and the door opens automatically for her as she gets close.
When she's done she goes to the kitchen to put the wallet on table, but because of her poor eyesight she drops it on the floor without noticing. She leaves the kitchen with her wallet left on the floor and goes to the living room to listen to the radio. When she enters the living room the dimmer lights turn on automatically, with increased intensity over time.
A while later Agda wants to go to the market to buy food but she can't find her wallet. On the wall there is a rotation sensor, she turns it to the right to find the wallet. The wallet has a lamp on it and the lamp starts to shine so that Agda easy can find the wallet on the floor.
When Agda walks back in to the hall she trips and falls on the floor. The floor senses the fall and the hospital is alerted at once so Agda can get help.
Design
All functions to help Agda live more independantly are based on sensors. Motion sensors and distance sensors are used to turn the dimmer lights on and to open doors. The dimmers are used to make it more smooth to her sensitive eyes.
When she enters the house a motion sensors reacts and the light intensity increases over time, and reaches maximum when her eyes are more used to the light.
The floor is covered with touch sensors, and based on the response from the sensors the program decides if an alert should be sent as an email.
A controller with a rotation wheel and a rotation sensor is used to help Agda find her lost valuables.
Different states on the controller are connected to different items, and by rotating the wheel Agda can choose which item to activate a light on, and therefore make it alot easier for her to see where she left it.
Discussion
Since Agda suffers from poor eyesight we chose to focus alot on that, but we also considered other issues for elderly people in general. The difficult to see makes it hard to find lost valuables and to find the light switch in the dark, so therefore we found those functions very useful for Agda.
Like alot of other elderly people Agda might also find it difficult to open doors and get up if she falls on the floor.
Her eyesight makes it even easier for her to trip on something, so the floor sensors felt very neccessary.
Since the touch sensors only respond to skin, it won't react if she keeps alot of stuff on the floor. Although it could be problematic if she had a pet.
Video channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/SmartHomeMovies?feature=mhee
