Wireless Sensor Network based smart homes have the potential to meet the growing challenges of independent living of elderly people in smart homes. However, wellness detection of elderly people in smart homes is still a challenging research domain. Many researchers have proposed several techniques; however, majority of these techniques does not provide a comprehensive solution because complex a...

One application of smart homes is to take sensor activations from a variety of sensors around the house and use them to recognise the particular behaviours of the inhabitants. There are many reasons to recognise human behaviours; one of the reasons being to monitor the elderly or cognitively impaired who are living alone. The thesis views the behaviour recognition problem as a task of mapping t...

An approach is presented for flexible management of smart homes, covering both home automation and telecare. The aim is to allow end users to manage their homes without requiring detailed technical knowledge or programming ability. This is achieved at three levels: managing home components and their interactions, stating policies for how the home system should react to events, and defining high...

When Christopher Sholes created the QWERTY keyboard layout in the 1860s (often assumed to be for slowing down fast typists), few would have imagined that his invention would become the dominant input device of the 20th century. In the early years of the 21st century (the so called 'speed and information' century), its use remains dominant, despite many, arguably better, input devices having bee...

Smart homes generally differ from other pervasive environments such as office environments. Homes are lack of system administrators to fix faulty services on the spot. Nevertheless, services in smart homes can be critical especially when they involve health and wellness services, since faulty services can lead to unexpected/undesirable consequences. Therefore, robustness and availability are tw...

Smart Homes have become firmly established as an active research area with potential for huge social and economic benefits. The concept of a Smart Home refers to the enrichment of a living environment with technology in order to offer improved habitual support to its inhabitants and therefore an improved quality of life for them. In this article we purport how advances from the device and techn...

There has been a lot of work focussing on activity recognition in smart homes, with the aim of the home being to monitor the activities of the inhabitant and identify deviations from the norm. For a smart home to support its inhabitants, the recognition system needs to accurately learn from the observations acquired through sensors, which are installed in the home. Given a predefined set of the...

Mobile and Ubiquitous technologies have the potential to strengthen and enrich geographically dispersed multigenerational family relationships and networks in ways that go well beyond existing telecommunications technologies. Smart home technologies could be developed specifically to facilitate a rich range of interactions between geographically dispersed members of multi-generational and exten...

The paper proposes a concept of power-consumption optimization in smart homes based on demandside management (DSM) and using smart able to control home electrical devices by a wireless connection. The advantages of the concept are lower power consumption without reducing the users living comfort and enabling the users to actively participate in the smart-grid load shedding.

Research on smart environments, such as smart homes and smart offices, have recently received increasing attention. In addition to the design and functionality of those devices, current research also focuses on usability and security (privacy). This paper describes a framework for smart homes, called Sec-Home, that supports flexibility, different communication media, as well as simple means to ...