Providing affordable, high-quality healthcare to the elderly while enabling them to live independently longer is of critical importance. In our Smart Condo project, we have deployed a wireless sensor network in an 850-square-foot condominium for assisted living. The sensor network records a variety of events and environmental parameters and feeds the related data into our web-based system. This system is responsible for inferring higher-order information about the activities of the condo's occupant and visualizing the collected information in both a 2D Geographic Information System (GIS) and a 3D virtual world. The architecture is flexible in terms of supported sensor types, analyses, and visualizations through which it communicates this information to its users, including the condo's occupant, their family, and their healthcare providers.

Providing affordable, high-quality healthcare to the elderly while enabling them to live independently longer is of critical importance, as this is an increasing and expensive demographic to treat. Sensor-network technologies are essential to developing assisted living environments. In our Smart Condo project, we have deployed a sensor network with a variety of sensor types in an 850 square-foot condominium. The sensor network records a variety of events and environmental parameters and feeds the related data into our web-based system. This system is responsible for inferring higher-order information about the activities of the condo's occupant and supporting the visualization of the collected information in a 2D Geographic Information System (GIS) and a 3D virtual world, namely Second Life (SL).

In this paper, we describe SensorGIS, an integrated architecture for WSN applications. SensorGIS provides an integrated service-oriented architecture for collecting, archiving, analyzing, and visualizing sensor network data in a geographic information system (GIS). By using an extendible GIS framework as one of its user views, SensorGIS can contextually communicate the collected data, its trends, and distinct values of interest. In addition, it is designed in the service-oriented style and hence is extendible in terms of the analyses and visualizations. Finally, it integrates an online collaborative forum that enables annotation of the collected data with the users' observations and interpretations.

Most would agree that older adults want affordable, high-quality healthcare that enables them to live independently longer and in their own homes. To this end, ambient assisted living environments have been developed that are able to non-intrusively monitor the health of people at-home and to provide them with improved care. The authors have designed an environment, the Smart Condo, to support seniors and rehabilitating patients. They have embedded a wireless sensor network into a model living space, which incorporates universal design principles. Information from the sensor network is archived in a server, which supports a range of views via APIs. One such view is a virtual world, which is realistic and intuitive, while remaining non-intrusive. This chapter examines computing technologies for smart healthcare-related environments and the needs of elderly patients. It discusses the Smart Condo architecture, reviews key research challenges, and presents the lessons learned through the project.

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