Software engineering for health education and care delivery systems: The Smart Condo project

Abstract

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).

Smart care spaces: pervasive sensing technologies for at-home care

“…So, overall, true smart care spaces require a holistic system comprising respect for environment data, patient-status data (including emotion data where possible) and intuitive interfaces, together with cloud systems capable of adequately processing those data and communicating relevant information to stakeholders. Much work has been undertaken on smart-home sensors, such as the 'smart condo' work of Stroulia et al (2009) which integrated a wide range of sensors into graphical information systems and 3D visualization.…”

Healthcare education with virtual-world simulations

“…Victor Vergara and colleagues at the University of New Mexico have developed a virtual environment-based tool to teach medical students about hematomas [37]. They have developed a a 3D, multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) within which students can interact with a virtual character, nicknamed "Mr. Toma," and other associated objects.…”

“…The work we have discussed in this paper on training environments within Virtual Worlds builds on our Smart Condo work [37]. Through these three activities, we are starting to recognize some common themes that characterize the development of software systems that include virtual world platforms and a set of general research questions in this area.…”

Failure‐resilient real‐time processing of health streams

“…Sensor networks are becoming ubiquitous as sensors become smaller, cheaper, and more power efficient. These sensors are deployed across a wide range of environments, from monitoring for early earthquake detection to smart condos and personal health monitoring . Sensors produce data intermittently or at regular intervals, creating data streams that are a set of correlated packets.…”