Silver Extension

Currently, smart home research is mainly focused on automating home functions to enhance convenience and the creature comforts of the residents. However, in order to gain the end users’ trust, a delicate balance between user control and smart enabling technologies is needed. For the elderly living on their own at home, loneliness is often a serious problem. There is currently a lack of innovative smart home designs which adopt appropriate technologies to meet the elderly residents’ higher level socio-emotional needs, such as companionship and socialization. In this project, we propose a set of technological extensions to an elderly person’s home environment to offer quality care. Our framework consists of the following extensions: 

• Communications extension: Making the home a portal for the elderly to access desired information in a simple, user-friendly way.
• Physical extension: Enabling the elderly with limited mobility to participate in interactive and engaging physical exercise at home.
• Space extension: Connecting the elderly with loved ones in a natural and affordable manner even when they are physically far apart.
• Service extension: Bringing trustworthy real world and virtual services to the elderly in a simple, easy-to-use fashion.
• Social extension: Providing the elderly with suggestions about suitable real-world social activities in an unobtrusive way, based on location, context and social signal information.
• Emotional extension: Offering the elderly personalized and around the clock caring, virtual companionship.
• Integrated Healthcare extension: Monitoring changes in the elderly’s physical and emotional conditions and offering prompt electronic or in-person healthcare services.