The smart house for older persons and persons with physical disabilities: structure, technology arrangements, and perspectives

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NEURAL SYSTEMS AND REHABILITATION ENGINEERING, VOL. 12, NO. 2, JUNE 2004

The Smart House for Older Persons and Persons With Physical Disabilities: Structure, Technology Arrangements, and Perspectives
Dimitar H. Stefanov, Senior Member, IEEE, Zeungnam Bien, Senior Member, IEEE, and Won-Chul Bang, Member, IEEE

Abstract—Smart houses are considered a good alternative for the independent life of older persons and persons with disabilities. Numerous intelligent devices, embedded into the home environment, can provide the resident with both movement assistance and 24-h health monitoring. Modern home-installed systems tend to be not only physically versatile in functionality but also emotionally human-friendly, i.e., they may be able to perform their functions without disturbing the user and without causing him/her any pain, inconvenience, or movement restriction, instead possibly providing him/her with comfort and pleasure. Through an extensive survey, this paper analyzes the building blocks of smart houses, with particular attention paid to the health monitoring subsystem as an important component, by addressing the basic requirements of various sensors implemented from both research and clinical perspectives. The paper will then discuss some important issues of the future development of an intelligent residential space with a human-friendly health monitoring functional system. Index Terms—Health monitoring, intelligent house, smart house, wearable sensor.

I. INTRODUCTION

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MART HOUSES include devices that have automatic functions and systems that can be remotely controlled by the user. The primary objective of a smart house is to enhance comfort, energy saving, and security for the residents in the house. The notion of a “smart home” was first introduced in the early 1980s when the “intelligent building” concept was also used [see 1) in the Appendix]. In the concept, the intelligent implementation of consumer electronic