This Special Issue presents the recent advances in sensor technologies for smart homes, including fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors for detecting the presence and number of occupants, the Internet of things for monitoring CO2 concentration, and designing a novel eye-tracking system for monitoring and controlling a smart home, and infrared thermal sensors for fall detection. Such new explorations are pushing the boundary of sensing technologies and, thus, will have more profound implications for the future smart home. Advanced machine learning and data mining algorithms have been proposed to address sensor failure, appliance identification, and human activity recognition in a home environment. These results will enable a promising, sustainable deployment of sensing technologies. A novel multi-agent gamification system is proposed for managing tasks between household members and between families, which demonstrate another dimension of future smart home application. This Special Issue concludes with a review on sensors for human activity recognition. This work paves the roadmap for deploying smart home systems in different socioeconomic contexts. The whole Special Issue has significantly helped to shape our understanding of the strength, implications, and barriers of deploying long-term, sustainable, sensor technologies for smart homes.

Smart homes, home automation and ambient-assisted living are terms used to describe technological systems that enrich our living environment and provide means to support care, facilitate well-being and improve comfort. This handbook provides an overview of the domain from the perspective of health care and technology. In Part 1, we set out to describe the demographic changes in society, including ageing and diseases and impairments which lead to the needs for technological solutions. In Part 2, we describe the technological solutions, ranging from sensor-based networks, components, to communication protocols that are used in the design of smart homes. We also deal will biomedical features which can be measured and services that can be delivered to end-users as well as the use of social robots. In Part 3, we present best practices in the field. These best practices mainly focus on existing projects in Europe, the USA and Asia, in which people receive help through dedicated technological solutions being part of the continuum of the home environment and care.

Calling for future law reform, Burdon questions if you will have privacy in a world of ubiquitous data collection.

Smart Sensors Networks: Communication Technologies and Intelligent Applications explores the latest sensor and sensor networks techniques and applications, showing how networked wireless sensors are used to monitor and gather intelligence from our surrounding environment. It provides a systematic look at the unique characteristics of wireless sensor networks through their usage in a broad range of areas, including healthcare for the elderly, energy consumption, industrial automation, intelligent transportation systems, smart homes and cities, and more. The book shows how sensor-networks work and how they are applied to monitor our surrounding environment. It explores the most important aspects of modern sensors technologies, providing insights on the newest technologies and the systems needed to operate them. Readers will find the book to be an entry point for understanding the fundamental differences between the various sensor technologies and their use in for different scenarios. Indexing: The books of this series are submitted to EI-Compendex and SCOPUS - Presents numerous specific use-cases throughout, showing practical applications of concepts - Contains contributions from leading experts around the globe - Collects, in one place, the latest thinking on an emerging topic - Addresses the security and privacy issues inherent in sensor deployment

Collecting and processing data is a necessary aspect of living in a technologically advanced society. Whether it’s monitoring events, controlling different variables, or using decision-making applications, it is important to have a system that is both inexpensive and capable of coping with high amounts of data. As the application of these networks becomes more common, it becomes imperative to evaluate their effectiveness as well as other opportunities for possible implementation in the future. Sensor Technology: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source that brings together new ways to process and monitor data and to put it to work in everything from intelligent transportation systems to healthcare to multimedia applications. It also provides inclusive coverage on the processing and applications of wireless communication, sensor networks, and mobile computing. Highlighting a range of topics such as internet of things, signal processing hardware, and wireless sensor technologies, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for research and development engineers, IT specialists, developers, graduate students, academics, and researchers.

Significant health-industry human resource needs increase the reliance on family and friends to support older adults hoping to age in place. This book explores how recent improvements in integrated home technologies have the potential to address those challenges. The book considers how embedded home sensors can be used to monitor the health and wellbeing of older adults and how that can be used to assist with supporting safety and well-being. The content is designed to help multiple stakeholders in the supportive smart home space to better understand the complexity of this field and the need for transdisciplinary collaboration. These stakeholders include the older adults who will benefit from supportive smart home technology; informal and formal caregiver and healthcare professionals concerned about the older adult’s well-being; researchers from multiple disciplines in the supportive smart home area and their funders; companies looking to develop solutions and services or expand their offerings; policy makers who want to ensure privacy and equity in access and a successful integration of these technologies into the evolving health and social services sectors; and students, the future leaders in AgeTech. Overall, the intent of the book is to inspire engineers, computer scientists, industrial designers, clinicians and healthcare providers, social scientists, students, policy makers, and older adults and their caregivers to collaborate in advancing the supportive smart home space to develop more options for aging in place.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference On Smart Homes and and Health Telematics, ICOST 2008, held in Ames, IA, USA, in June/July 2008. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on assistive technology to improve quality of life for older adults and their caregivers; context awareness/autonomous computing; devices, systems and algorithms for vision/hearing/cognitive/communication impairments; home health monitoring and intervention; human-machine interface and ambient intelligence; modeling of physical and conceptual information in intelligent environments; real world deployments and experiences in smart homes, hospitals, and living communities; and social/privacy/security issues.