INTRODUCTION This editorial is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on "Using Data from Ambient Assisted Living and Smart Homes in Electronic Health Records". BACKGROUND To increase efficiency in the health care of the future, data from innovative technology like it is used for ambient assisted living (AAL) or smart homes should be available for individual health deci...

Multi-agent system paradigm has been envisioned as an appropriate solution for challenges in the area of smart-environments . Specifically, MAS add new capabilities such as adaption, reorganization, learning, coordination, etc. These features allow to deal with open issues in the context of smart-homes such as multi-occupancy, activity tracking or profiling activities and behaviors from multipl...

The term Smart Home typically refers to dwellings augmented with high-tech responsive systems such that heating, air conditioning, lighting, appliances, entertainment outlets, and architectural components are computerized and managed, often via a remote control. Smart homes promise comfort, convenience, and resource conservation in the near future. Yet the notion of increased dependency on tech...

With the rapid advancement in technology, smart homes have become applicable and so the need arise to solve the security challenges that are accompanied with its operation. Passwords and identity cards have been used as traditional authentication mechanisms in home environments, however, the rise of misuse of these mechanisms are proving them to be less reliable. For instance, ID cards can be m...

SPOK is an End-User Development Environment that permits people to monitor, control, and configure smart home services and devices. SPOK has been deployed for more than 4 months in the homes of 5 project team members for testing and refinement, prior to longitudinal experiments in the homes of families not involved in the project. This article reports on the lessons learned in this initial depl...

The paper addresses modular hierarchical design (composition) of a management system for smart homes. The management system consists of security subsystem (access control, alarm control), comfort subsystem (temperature, etc.), intelligence subsystem (multimedia, houseware). The design solving process is based on Hierarchical Morphological Multicriteria Design (HMMD) approach: (1) design of a tr...

Inhabitants of today’s smarter homes struggle with complicated user interfaces and inflexible home configurations. The proposed smart home recommender system addresses these issues by continuously interpreting the user’s current situation and recommending services that fit the user’s habits, i.e. automate some action that the user would want to perform anyway. With these recommendations it is p...

Computer systems have shown in the past (Zajicek, 2000) that they can be powerful allies in home-based health care and offer great potential to improve quality of life but only if they are designed to take into consideration the specific needs of their beneficiaries. Satisfying usability as well as the functional requirements in such a home setting are equally critical. This paper discusses the...

In this work, we propose a Realistic Scheduling Mechanism (RSM) to reduce user frustration and enhance appliance utility by classifying appliances with respective constraints and their time of use effectively. Algorithms are proposed regarding functioning of home appliances. A 24 hour time slot is divided into four logical sub-time slots, each composed of 360 min or 6 h. In these sub-time slots...

Smart homes are sensor-rich environments that contain dynamic sets of interacting components. These components often use competing and closed standards and form a message-based architecture. This complicates the development of applications that require information from disparate sources. It becomes difficult to add new components or to allow components from different applications to interact wi...