In smart home environment research, little attention has been given to monitoring, analyzing, and predicting energy usage, despite the fact that electricity consumption in homes has grown dramatically in the last few decades. We envision that a potential application of this smart environment technology is predicting the energy would be used to support specific daily activities. The purpose of t...

This paper describes efforts toward creating an integrated living space to support heightened awareness of a user’s environment. The work seeks to balance the needs and desires of an individual with those of other people within the locality, community, and world, to include basic comforts like temperature and humidity of a living environment as well as use of resources like power and water. The...

This work describes a potential solution to the problems caused by the heterogeneous nature of the data which may be collected within smart home environments. Such information may be generated at an intraor interinstitutional level following laboratory testing or based on in-situ evaluations. We offer a solution to this problem in the form of a system/application/format independent means of sto...

New York City is often held up as a successful example of arts-led economic development. Case studies have documented the influx of avant-garde artists and galleries into several neighborhoods, including Greenwich Village, SoHo, and Chelsea, followed by yuppies and boutiques. Some researchers have used these examples to argue that artists and galleries can spur gentrification. An alternative hy...

The temporal nature of data collected in a smart environment provides us with a better understanding of patterns over time. Detecting anomalies in such datasets is a complex and challenging task. To solve this problem, we suggest a solution using temporal relations. Temporal pattern discovery based on modified Allen’s temporal relations [5] has helped discover interesting patterns and relations...

Ubiquitous computing research have extended traditional environments in the so–called Intelligent Environments. All of them use their capabilities for pursuing their inhabitants’s satisfaction, but the ways of getting it are most of the times unclear and frequently unshared among different users. This last problem becomes patent in shared environments in which users with different preferences l...

20TH ANNUAL RCS: The 2010 Retirement Confidence Survey-the 20th annual wave of this survey-finds that the record-low confidence levels measured during the past two years of economic decline appear to have bottomed out. The percentage of workers veryconfident about having enough money for a comfortable retirement has stabilized at 16 percent, which is statistically equivalent to the 20-year low ...

The October and November 2004 HHN Accreditation Strategies columns addressed the new Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (Joint Commission) home care and hospice survey process describing in detail components of each survey activity. This column builds on the foundation laid in the two columns and focuses on survey process nuances for complex organizations, specificall...

To many people, home is a sanctuary. For those people who need special medical care, they may need to be pulled out of their home to meet their medical needs. As the population ages, the percentage of people in this group is increasing and the effects are expensive as well as unsatisfying. We hypothesize that many people with disabilities can lead independent lives in their own homes with the a...

In this paper we propose an agent-based approach for controlling the behavior of a Smart Home Environment that, based on the recognized situation and user goal, selects a suitable workflow for combining services of the environment. To this aim we have developed a butler agent that employs user and context modeling for supporting proactive adaptation of the interaction with the house. The user c...