Safe Home Smart Home

Designing Safe Smart Home Systems for Vulnerable People

Designing assistive technological solutions for people with disabilities and older people is fraught with problems due to the number of agencies involved. These problems are compounded by the lack of understanding that can exist between the engineers and the health staff. This lack of understanding can develop into extreme delays in installing the technology and the needs of the person with dis...

Safe European home.

B ack in the days when there were still enough faculty positions for postdocs to go to, I had a romantic (never realized) dream to take a detour via Africa or Central America or some remote island paradise, before returning to Europe to set up my laboratory. Then as now, the science being done in developing countries was mainly tied to the specific problems of those countries, whether in regard...

Are home births safe?

Rethinking the “Smart” Home

In this paper we consider what it should mean to build ‘smartness’ or ‘intelligence’ into the home. We introduce an argument suggesting that it is people who imbue their homes with intelligence by continually weaving together things in their physical worlds with their everyday routines and distinct social arrangements. To develop this argument we draw on four ongoing projects concerned with des...

Programming the Smart Home

A smart home is a house that is responsive to its inhabitants and their actions by being aware of their context. Potential applications for smart homes address economic and comfort aspects of living, or could provide unobtrusive support for the elderly or disabled to promote independent living. The basic building blocks of such a smart home is a computing system consisting of distributed sensor...