Programming home care

Abstract

The home is composed of many different devices, services and technologies. These rarely communicate with one another, and require various different computer systems and applications to be able to interact with them all remotely. A challenge within telecare is being able to exploit the functionality of these devices within the home and offer a common means of control, monitoring and programming, either locally or remotely. Homer, a home system designed and developed at the University of Stirling, can communicate with any device within the home and then expose the functionality to a range of different interfaces on different platforms and devices. This paper introduces Homer, describing how it communicates with the devices within the home, a brief description of the system architecture, and finally describes its user interfaces for the home. Home requirements are introduced at the beginning of the paper, explored throughout, and finally evaluated at the end. © 2011 ICST.