A ubiquitous smart home for elderly

One major challenge to successful aging is the capability to preserve health, or from another perspective to avoid disease. Unfortunately, a large percentage of the elderly people are living with chronic diseases or disabilities. Home care technologies and other emerging technologies have the potential to play a major role in home-based health care approach. The advent of sensor technology, in addition to telecom industry has made this possible. The main goal of the presented research in this paper is to develop a cost-effective user-friendly telehealth system to serve the elderly and disabled people in the community. The research also aims at utilizing the state-of-the-art advances in medical instrumentation technology to establish a continuous communication link between patients and caregivers and allow physicians to offer help when needed. Hence, we are presenting here an integrated user-friendly model of a smart home which provides telemedicine for elderly at home. The general problem addressed in this paper is that of offering a smart environment which monitors the elderly continuously as he moves around at home, and sends an emergency call for help in case of an occurrence of an accident or a severe health problem. The paper focuses on implementation details and practical considerations of integrating the diverse technologies into a working system.