Designing a sustainable smart home network for elderly people

A smart home is a special environment where numerous objects can easily communicate and jointly execute tasks to achieve higher performances, increase the dwellings’ comfort and control home behaviors. For these reasons, the smart home can offer great benefits for fragile users, which require having support in their everyday activities and monitoring their lifestyle, such as elderly people. However, smart home technologies are usually complex and expensive, and neither sustainable nor suitable for elderly. Furthermore, the increasing embedded intelligence of smart objects and the huge quantity of devices recently available are generating difficulties in data management and architecture definition. As a result, interoperability and ease to use are hard to combine and the obtained performances are limited in respect with the potential ones. This paper defines a methodology to design a proper smart objects network according to the needs of elderly people with the final aim to create a sustainable smart home for this specific application. In particular, the intelligent network supports the independent living by monitoring the users’ wellbeing; furthermore it assures its sustainability by the conscious selection of the devices as well as the controlled use of the objects and related resources. Finally, a valuable case study is presented.