As the older people population increases, the cost of medical services increases. Smart homes can help older people keep health, and let them to stay in touch with society. Professional surveillance cameras, voice devices and sensors embedded in wearable devices and home appliances can be used to detect the state of older people. The internet has laid the foundation for remote health detection, such as medical consulting services and assisted living service.
Sensors are used in smart home to connect people with smart home devices. Passive infrared sensors and RFID tags are used to collect related data, such as temperature and body position. Wearable sensors are used to measure heart rate or blood pressure. When unhealthy conditions occur, smart home can alert caregivers or older people.
Wearable and furniture or smartphones may have lower costs than voice devices and cameras that consume a lot of computing power. For example, Pierleoni et al. proposed a wearable device to detect falls through the waist. Wang et al. designed a fall detection system based on accelerometer, cardiometer and smart sensors Abbate et al. Used the accelerometer of smart phone to measure the user’s movement to detect the fall and issue a warning. Nam et al. designed a smart bed based on pressure sensor and triaxial accelerometer that can detect different sleep stages and early symptoms of sleep disorders.
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However, the combined design of sensors and video equipment may be more accurate. In addition, the smart home can help older people with dementia to take medicine through voice. Designers may adopt different algorithms for older people, who may need lower detection threshold or more sensors.
Smart home devices transmit the data to hospitals, older people can get medical services by subscribing to related medical services, such as video counseling, health testing, emergency care services. Choudhury et al. proposed a monitoring system based on smart phones that can send the user’s location information to the emergency center or paramedics in an emergency (Choudhury et al., 2015). In addition to get medical services, older people can exercise through smart home.
Older people who suffer from blindness and hidden dangers caused due to living alone may get help through smart homes. Older people get a closer connection with friends or children through remote communication and services. Rich sensors provide children with physical data of parents to make timely responses. Children and parents can also share the latest photos or news with each other. But the benefits of social robots should be noted. On the other hand, smart homes can prevent potential dangers by monitoring home devices. Such as gas leaks, damaged faucets, and illegal intrusion.
However, we should note that the smart home is not a pure functions set. Therefore, when designing the user interface of an overall smart home project, reasonable functional or navigation structure must be considered. In general, when designing for older people, the factors of older people are worth considering.
Smart homes also raise security or privacy issues by collecting large amounts of data. In order to improve the service level of applications, more and more third-party platform share user data, and the risk of privacy leakage is also increasing. In addition to implementing laws addressing privacy issues in smart homes, designers should also consider user privacy data protection measures when designing smart homes.
