A review of the potential of smart homes to support independent living

Between 2015 and 2050, the proportion of the world's population over 60 years of age is expected to nearly double, from 12% to 22%. Whilst hospitals offer care to people with health problems, support at home is generally limited to carers, a costly labour intensive method that impacts on the ability of many elderly patients to live independently. This pushes the demand for housing that caters for elderly people allowing them to remain in their homes but with some level of healthcare support. In the UK, the domestic sector currently accounts for around 30% of total energy consumption and contributes in the region of 27% of total carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. With an ageing population, offering healthy environments with a cushion against rising energy prices will be essential for people spending most of their time at home and often living on limited budgets. In this context, the drive to reduce energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions from housing has acted as a catalyst in the increasing installation of meters and sensors for monitoring energy use and indoor environmental conditions in buildings. These monitoring technologies can track and record a range of parameters such as temperature, air quality, occupant behaviour etc. Many of these could be optimised to help create environments that assist people such as the elderly to live at home. This paper aims to review relevant studies and technologies in the areas of smart, energy-efficient and lifetime homes, identifying some of the health needs of elderly people who could live at home if provided with adequate support, the range and type of technologies that could be employed to this objective, and suitable metrics to be used to measure the effectiveness of these technologies. The paper concludes that there is a limited evidence base on the health effects of energy-efficient homes, highlighting the need for more research and post occupancy evaluation using indoor environmental quality monitoring technology and wearable devices to analyse not only the energy performance of ‘green’ housing but also the possible effects of indoor environmental conditions on the subjective and objective wellbeing of occupants

Analysis of Human Behavior, in Everyday-Life Contexts, for the Development of New Technologies, in Support of the Improvement of Life Quality and Wellbeing

Analisi del comportamento umano, in contesti di vita quotidiana, per lo sviluppo di nuove tecnologie, a supporto della qualit\ue0 della vita e dello sviluppo di benessere INTRODUZIONE: Il presente progetto di ricerca nasce all\u2019interno di un Dottorato Eureka, sviluppato grazie al contributo della Regione Marche, dell\u2019Universit\ue0 di Macerata e dell\u2019azienda MAC srl di Recanati. MAC progetta, sviluppa e produce sistemi e dispositivi elettronici all\u2019avanguardia, cercando costantemente di comprendere e soddisfare i bisogni e i desideri dell\u2019utente finale, allo scopo di migliorarne la qualit\ue0 di vita, in un\u2019ottica di affidabilit\ue0 e sicurezza. La suddetta ricerca scaturisce da un approccio concettuale e metodologico che Luigi Mandolini (MAC CEO) ha sviluppato e validato nel corso degli anni, e che \ue8 ormai alla base di ciascun progetto ideato e realizzato in azienda. Capovolgendo completamente la storica prospettiva secondo la quale spetterebbe all\u2019essere umano adattarsi ai cambiamenti tecnologici, alle innovazioni e all\u2019ambiente che lo circonda, rispondendo unicamente agli input forniti dalle macchine, tale approccio mette al centro l\u2019essere umano e pone le competenze tecnologiche al servizio dell'utente, per creare il prodotto / servizio giusto per il bene suo e del suo ambiente. L\u2019Universit\ue0 di Macerata e MAC, seppur da angolazioni completamente differenti, concordano nel considerare lo studio dell\u2019essere umano e del suo comportamento il punto di partenza per la ricerca e l\u2019ispirazione per l\u2019innovazione. Entrambe si impegnano regolarmente per colmare il divario tra cultura scientifico-tecnologica e cultura umanistica: componente tecnica e componente umana non possono mai essere separate. Le tecnologie per la domotica sono, infatti, profondamente collegate alla mente dell'utente finale e al suo modo di percepire, fare attenzione, capire, apprendere, ricordare e comunicare: cos\uec, lo studio di questi processi mentali nella prospettiva del ciclo di vita pu\uf2 contribuire allo sviluppo di smart devices. La riflessione iniziale \ue8 scaturita dal fatto che, troppo spesso, le persone che agiscono sui dispositivi indoor (relativi a temperatura, luce, suono, ecc.), in casa cos\uec come in ufficio, non sono completamente consapevoli del funzionamento di questi sistemi e non riescono a raggiungere il benessere desiderato. L\u2019interazione attiva con un dispositivo, al fine di adattare la tecnologia alle proprie esigenze del momento, pu\uf2 comportare, soprattutto per i soggetti pi\uf9 deboli, un impegno fisico e cognitivo non indifferente: proprio per questo motivo, gli stessi sistemi dovrebbero essere in grado di \u201cinterpretare\u201d i comportamenti degli utenti sulla base delle loro percezioni di comfort e/o discomfort, da un punto di vista termico, luminoso, acustico, ecc., in ambienti interni di vita quotidiana. OBIETTIVI: Sulla base delle teorie di riferimento analizzate e dei principi aziendali \ue8 stata, quindi, elaborata la seguente domanda di ricerca: \u201c\uc8 possibile creare il comfort ideale (termico, luminoso, acustico, ecc.) in un ambiente interno, minimizzando l\u2019attivit\ue0 dell\u2019utente finale nel momento in cui egli / ella \ue8 alla ricerca dello stesso?\u201d. Questo progetto \ue8, infatti, incentrato sul tema della tecnologia pensata a favore del benessere e del comfort degli utenti, soprattutto di quelli in situazioni di maggiore fragilit\ue0, quali, ad esempio, gli anziani non autosufficienti. Partendo dal concetto di utente finale come sensore che guida la ricerca e la progettazione di dispositivi intelligenti, obiettivo ultimo \ue8 la comprensione dell\u2019essere umano e del suo sviluppo attraverso il ciclo della vita, per la realizzazione di sistemi capaci di rendere, quanto pi\uf9 possibile, semplice e funzionale l\u2019interazione essere umano-macchina e di fornire, a persone con bisogni differenti, il giusto comfort (in termini di temperatura, luce, suono, ecc.) all\u2019interno del loro ambiente di vita quotidiana. METODO E FASI DI RICERCA: Il paradigma teorico che si \ue8 scelto di adottare \ue8 di tipo costruttivista, il quale attribuisce al ricercatore il ruolo di un partecipante e di un facilitatore dei processi di comprensione e di ristrutturazione delle costruzioni della realt\ue0, proprie dei soggetti studiati. Il primo passo del nostro studio \ue8 stato quello di ricostruire lo stato dell\u2019arte, raccogliendo informazioni e dati, attraverso la ricerca bibliografica e sitografica, sulla domotica e sulla qualit\ue0 dell\u2019ambiente interno (IEQ). Il progetto si \ue8 poi sviluppato attraverso quattro differenti fasi. Nella prima fase \ue8 stata avviata un\u2019osservazione sul campo in molteplici ambienti interni, pubblici e privati (case, uffici, universit\ue0, ecc.), sia in Italia che all\u2019estero (Europa e USA), con l\u2019intento di rilevare differenti comportamenti (sulla persona e sull\u2019ambiente), reazioni fisiche e comunicazioni verbali che possono essere interpretati come espressione delle sensazioni di caldo e/o di freddo percepite dalle persone all\u2019interno del loro ambiente di vita quotidiana. Un\u2019ulteriore fase della ricerca ha riguardato delle specifiche osservazioni sul campo, concernenti l\u2019invecchiamento, svoltesi in cinque differenti strutture sanitarie (case di riposo e centri di riabilitazione), situate nella regione Marche, al fine di rilevare i differenti comportamenti (sulla persona e sull\u2019ambiente), reazioni fisiche e comunicazioni verbali che possono essere letti come manifestazione di un certo tipo di disagio, a livello termico e luminoso, provato dagli anziani che abitano all\u2019interno di queste strutture assistenziali. La terza fase \ue8 consistita nella conduzione di interviste a differenti figure professionali, nello specifico medici, educatori professionali, fisioterapisti, infermieri, operatori socio-sanitari (O.S.S.) e psicologi, che si occupano di invecchiamento e lavorano nel centro Italia, con l\u2019intento di raccogliere informazioni e opinioni basate sulla loro esperienza diretta e riguardanti il contesto in cui esse lavorano e le persone anziane con cui giornalmente si relazionano. Infine, per cercare di capire se i comportamenti rilevati attraverso l\u2019osservazione in ambienti interni generici possono essere considerati inequivocabili o interpretabili, nell\u2019ultima fase della ricerca si \ue8 ritenuto opportuno creare un questionario con scale di frequenza e somministrarlo, nelle province di Macerata e di Fermo (regione Marche), a persone comuni, scelte con criterio randomizzato e appartenenti a cinque differenti fasce d\u2019et\ue0, al fine di rilevare la frequenza di differenti comportamenti (sulla persona e sull\u2019ambiente), reazioni fisiche e comunicazioni verbali, che possono essere letti come manifestazione di un certo tipo di disagio termico, provato da questi individui nel loro contesto quotidiano. Ci\uf2 ha permesso di mettere a confronto i dati risultanti da questa analisi con quelli raccolti tramite checklist e avere maggiori informazioni rispetto alle percezioni delle persone osservate. CONCLUSIONI: L\u2019intento \ue8 stato quello di fornire, attraverso la nostra indagine, uno spaccato di realt\ue0, che mostrasse, nel modo pi\uf9 naturalistico possibile, ci\uf2 che quotidianamente accade nella vita di persone di diversa fascia d\u2019et\ue0, in relazione al comfort ambientale interno. Tutti i dati raccolti potranno essere utili alla progettazione di dispositivi capaci di fornire un aumento del benessere e un miglioramento della qualit\ue0 della vita di tutti gli individui, anche di quelli pi\uf9 deboli, come gli anziani non autosufficienti. Punti di forza di questa ricerca sono sicuramente l\u2019aver messo al centro l\u2019essere umano, nella sua totalit\ue0 e complessit\ue0, e l\u2019aver condotto un\u2019analisi sul campo del comportamento umano in contesti di vita quotidiana, cercando costantemente di far dialogare e interagire la cultura umanistica con quella tecnologica. Partendo dal concetto di comfort termico, vi \ue8 la volont\ue0 di considerare ulteriori sviluppi e possibilit\ue0 di applicazione, anche in altri ambiti, della metodologia testata in questo studio

Sustainable design guidelines for new and existing schools in Egypt

As a global society, we are faced with an ever-growing number of sustainability challenges in the social, environmental and economic sectors. Visions for addressing such challenges have been put forward in international blueprints and policy agreements on advancing sustainable development. In these documents and agreements, education has been identified as a crucial avenue for pushing forward sustainable behaviors. Education is the fundamental element for the development of any nation, and its shortage has a direct effect on the social, environmental and economic development of the country (El Baradei & Baradei, 2004). Turning schools into sustainable schools has been a research and policy focus for years, especially throughout the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Building codes and practices play an important role in turning schools into places of sustainable learning and behavior. Previous research has addressed the concept of sustainable schools extensively, in the lights of the sustainable school design criteria and the positive impacts of having sustainable physical spaces for education. However, none cater for the Egyptian context, and are simultaneously based on building assessment standards, as well as the integration of appropriate social, environmental, and economic sustainability themes. The research project explores the requirements of Egyptian schools in the implementation of sustainable school designs and architectural changes. The thesis takes a qualitative research method with an inductive approach, in which theory development is based on and evolves with the study\u27s findings. The thesis will make suggestions for the content of a new guideline, based on the available literature as well as on the analysis of detailed data collected based on the observation of school grounds and daily school routines and procedures during a series of school visits. The directing parameters of the guideline are based on sustainable building assessment guidelines, Egypt\u27s pressing social, economic and environmental concerns, pedagogy of educational environments, students\u27 social, psychological, and developmental needs, in order to develop a holistic framework. The guideline is divided into two main sections; new and existing schools. The guideline is further divided into three main sustainability categories: energy, water, and habitat; which is following the same category division adopted by EGGBC in the Tarsheed guidelines. The procedures of the research use a case study approach that focuses on one public school in Cairo, Gamal Abd El-Nasser which is located in Boulaq El Dakrour (BD), one of the poorest informal areas located in the western urban area of Greater Cairo within the boundaries of Giza Governorate. Criteria for selecting the school as a case study included choosing a preparatory school where the overall school infrastructure and conditions were of medium quality standards, making the school a potential candidate for upgrading its school infrastructure and processes to become a sustainable school in the future. The developed guideline is implemented in the case study school to demonstrate the flexibility, affordability and simplicity of attaining the required credits within the guidelines. The school scores a total of 9 out of 26 points in the Energy category, 7 out of 18 points in the Water category, 3 out of 12 points in the Indoor Environmental Quality sub-category, 6 out of 6 points in the Materials sub-category, and 36 out of 41 points in Sustainable Sites sub-category. This provides a sum of 56 out of 100 points, which awards the school a silver rating

Purchasing house preferences among person with disabilities (PWD) in Kuala Lumpur

In Malaysia, disabled people have often been ignored and manipulated especially on their rights and full participation within community. Being aware of this scenario, the Department of Social Welfare Malaysia as one of the responsible government agencies has always implemented programs and strategies in protecting this vulnerable group. Therefore, this paper identifies the preferences in purchasing a house in accordance to the type of disabilities which are visually impaired and physically challenged people on the related issues in terms of design, price and location of a house. A total of 400 respondents in Kuala Lumpur were involved in the questionnaire survey. It was found that about 60.5% respondents have a priority in choosing a desirable location as the key principle in purchasing a house which constitutes for a safe neighbourhood and proximity to working place, service and facilities. Overall, housing provision for disabled people should afford the same standard of comfort, choice and accessibility. Hence, further research is needed to determine the appropriate criteria that encourage independent living which suit their capability and satisfy their needs

Indoor monitoring and long-term survey to identify the risks of Energy Poverty: the case of social housing in Northern Italy

Low-income families often live in poorly heated houses belonging to social housing programs. Tenants’ wellbeing and health in social housing is typically threatened by problems associated with energy inefficiency and poor Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ). These conditions are among the symptoms of a social issue known as Energy Poverty (EP), which occurs when residents face difficulty in paying energy bills. In 2020 about 2.1 million households (8% of the total) were suffering from energy poverty in Italy. The risk of EP is mainly favored by three factors: the low income of the family, the high final price of energy and the poor technical construction characteristics of the building which can lead to poor IEQ. Four indicators have been proposed by the European Commission and some others developed in the scientific literature, but often neither the thresholds to assess the status of EP nor the methodology to collect data have been defined. This study aims to assess some of the recommended European indicators on a case study. The risks of EP have been investigated in social housing located in Northern Italy by means of an integrated methodology based on a site inspection, a survey, and the continuous monitoring of the indoor environmental parameters during the winter season. The proposed method allowed detecting the presence of EP in 5 dwellings out of 8

Navigation, Path Planning, and Task Allocation Framework For Mobile Co-Robotic Service Applications in Indoor Building Environments

Recent advances in computing and robotics offer significant potential for improved autonomy in the operation and utilization of today’s buildings. Examples of such building environment functions that could be improved through automation include: a) building performance monitoring for real-time system control and long-term asset management; and b) assisted indoor navigation for improved accessibility and wayfinding. To enable such autonomy, algorithms related to task allocation, path planning, and navigation are required as fundamental technical capabilities. Existing algorithms in these domains have primarily been developed for outdoor environments. However, key technical challenges that prevent the adoption of such algorithms to indoor environments include: a) the inability of the widely adopted outdoor positioning method (Global Positioning System - GPS) to work indoors; and b) the incompleteness of graph networks formed based on indoor environments due to physical access constraints not encountered outdoors. The objective of this dissertation is to develop general and scalable task allocation, path planning, and navigation algorithms for indoor mobile co-robots that are immune to the aforementioned challenges. The primary contributions of this research are: a) route planning and task allocation algorithms for centrally-located mobile co-robots charged with spatiotemporal tasks in arbitrary built environments; b) path planning algorithms that take preferential and pragmatic constraints (e.g., wheelchair ramps) into consideration to determine optimal accessible paths in building environments; and c) navigation and drift correction algorithms for autonomous mobile robotic data collection in buildings. The developed methods and the resulting computational framework have been validated through several simulated experiments and physical deployments in real building environments. Specifically, a scenario analysis is conducted to compare the performance of existing outdoor methods with the developed approach for indoor multi-robotic task allocation and route planning. A simulated case study is performed along with a pilot experiment in an indoor built environment to test the efficiency of the path planning algorithm and the performance of the assisted navigation interface developed considering people with physical disabilities (i.e., wheelchair users) as building occupants and visitors. Furthermore, a case study is performed to demonstrate the informed retrofit decision-making process with the help of data collected by an intelligent multi-sensor fused robot that is subsequently used in an EnergyPlus simulation. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods in a range of applications involving constraints on both the environment (e.g., path obstructions) and robot capabilities (e.g., maximum travel distance on a single charge). By focusing on the technical capabilities required for safe and efficient indoor robot operation, this dissertation contributes to the fundamental science that will make mobile co-robots ubiquitous in building environments in the near future.PHDCivil EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143969/1/baddu_1.pd