Purpose: This article reports on a pilot study of a smart home for elders (SHfE) designed to continuously monitor senior adults’ daily behaviors and the living environment of their residential homes using the application of unobtrusive sensors. SHfE users include older adults, their family members, and healthcare staff. Background: Globally, countries are experiencing the challenges of an increasingly aging population. A healthy environment is essential to support aging in place. By applying information and communications technology to building environments to support health, smart homes may be an option to provide a low-cost, comfortable, and user-friendly living environment for older adults. Method: A pilot study was conducted in a capital city in the Yangtze River Delta Agglomerations in China to verify the feasibility of the SHfE. One female older adult participated in the pilot study, which was conducted from November 2015 to January 2016. Results: The results indicated that the SHfE is a feasible way to analyze the behaviors (e.g., sleeping, cooking, water usage) of the elder and monitor the built environment (e.g., temperature, windows, and doors). Conclusions: The pilot study can be used as a baseline for further comprehensive experiments, case studies, and surveys to gain a better understanding of a smart healthy environment for older adults. On the basis of the current study, several recommendations are put forward for further implementation of the SHfE, including integrating multiple unobtrusive sensing devices; detecting fall accidents; monitoring indoor lighting, noise, and ventilation; remotely controlling electrical appliances; and developing the system with various languages. It is anticipated that the SHfE will be adopted in seniors’ residential homes in countries around the world which face an increasingly aging population.
Due to the rapid growth of the ageing population and the shrinking of family size in China, there has been a steady increase in the demand for nursing homes. The Chinese government has encouraged the development of nursing homes. However, there is no clear understanding of the thermal environment of nursing homes and the thermal comfort of their residents. Therefore, this paper describes a pilot study that was undertaken to investigate the thermal comfort of senior residents living in nursing homes. A wireless sensor network system was developed to continuously monitor the thermal environment of nursing homes for an entire year. Site measurements and a questionnaire also were conducted. The results revealed significant seasonal variations in the thermal environment of nursing homes and in the thermal comfort, thermal sensation and adaptive behaviours of older adults. The calculation of thermal comfort was modified according to the older adults’ behaviour patterns. The knowledge acquired in this initial study will enrich knowledge of the thermal comfort of older adults living in nursing homes. It also will provide preliminary insights for caregivers, designers and policymakers in their efforts to deliver a more comfortable, healthy and sustainable environment in nursing homes in China.
Most existing studies on device-free indoor localisation aim to improve localisation performance by deploying a large number of sensor nodes in indoor environments, thereby resulting in high hardware cost, more energy consumption and other drawbacks. This paper proposes a wrapper, heuristic and sensor-based node deployment method, which reduces the number of deployed sensors while achieving a high localisation accuracy by selecting the fittest link feature subset in localisation datasets. The performance results reveal that the proposed method outperforms existing work in terms of the number of deployed nodes, consequently can greatly thin out the extra nodes, shorten the localisation response time and save energy. Furthermore, the method can easily adjust the number of specific nodes by flipping the coefficient ratio of transmitters and receivers in the fitness function.
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