Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 24-6 - 37

Smart Home Technologies for
Cognitive Assessment
in Healthcare
Luca Lombardo
W
ith the term " smart home " developers usually
refer to a house, or more generally a residential
environment, where a set of integrated sensors,
devices and technologies provides the occupants with innovative
functionalities and utilities which improve both the living
comfort and the resource management of the building.
As an example, it is nowadays common to find in several
houses smart systems for controlling the heating systems.
Such systems, thanks to specific sensors and actuators deployed
in the house, are able to automatically set the most
suitable environmental conditions, such as temperature and
humidity, according to the weather, the number of occupants,
and their activities.
Similar systems are available for controlling lights and
several domestic appliances, with the main advantage of
reducing the occupants' effort in managing such settings, improving
their living conditions and optimizing the energy
consumption.
Recently, however, such technologies have also been employed
in the field of healthcare. As a matter of fact, the
increasing availability of low-cost sensing and high-performance
processing devices is paving the way for the
employment of smart home technologies in monitoring and
assistance applications for the elderly, or any people who
are experiencing reduced capabilities or some kind of impairment.
As an example, telemedicine infrastructures and
cognitive/well-being monitoring systems are becoming quite
diffused in several countries.
With the aim to provide a basic overview on this topic, this
article will discuss the technologies usually employed in smart
homes which can also be successfully applied in the healthcare
field.
Smart Home Technologies
Smart homes base their functionalities on the ability to monitor
environmental parameters and detect a set of specific activities
the occupants are performing during their daily life [1], [2]. In
order to accomplish such a task, smart homes first need several
types of sensors which collect data, process them and carry out
September 2021
specific actions according to what is happening inside home.
Fig. 1a shows the main components embedded in a smart
home and how they collect and process data. Smart home technologies
can be, therefore, considered as a sort of distributed
measurement system which, apart from the intrinsic advantages
of such systems [3], embed some sort of " intelligence "
and " decision capability, " developed with the final aim of improving
the living experience of the home's occupants.
To this aim a set of " smart sensors " need to be deployed in
the home environment. These sensors are able to perform specific
measurements, acquiring the required data and, often,
performing preliminary data processing. Therefore, each sensor
embeds a complete measurement chain mainly composed
of the physical transducer, some analog conditioning circuit,
an Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) and a processing unit
such as a micro-controller or a low-power processor.
Optionally, a biasing circuit is provided as well to properly
bias the transducer. Quality and reliability of the acquired
data are mainly related to the performance of the measurement
chain and, therefore, special care should be undertaken in the
design of these blocks, possibly including a calibration support,
to guarantee the required levels of data accuracy over the
operative life of the system. Fig. 1b shows the block diagram
of a typical sensor which may be employed in smart home
applications. Since acquired data need to be transferred, the
processing unit is also usually responsible for the communication
protocol of the sensor. Moreover, the smart sensor should
embed a power supply unit (such as a battery or an energy harvester)
and a communication interface suitable for the network
infrastructure deployed in the system, and optionally, should
contain local memory for storing acquired data and settings.
The network infrastructure (Fig. 1a) covers the home environment
to provide the support which allows the sensors to
communicate together and to transmit the acquired data to a
central processing unit. Such a network can be of any type, according
to the application and the type of sensors employed.
However, such an infrastructure typically implements a wireless
sensor network because of the advantages that a wireless
link is able to provide, such as the ease of sensor deployment
IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine
1094-6969/21/$25.00©2021IEEE
37
Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 24-6

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 24-6
