THE HOME THAT
LOOKS OUT FOR YOU 

By 2050, people aged over 80 will make up more than 9% of the population in developed nations, compared with less than 4% now. The obvious question is how our societies will look after them all.

The obvious answer is to have their homes pick up some of the slack say Professors Trish Williams and Anthony Maeder, who hope to have a prototype ‘smart home’ up and running within five years.

The pair moved from different parts of Australia to Adelaide in 2016 to set up and co-lead the Flinders Digital Health Research Centre, an exciting multidisciplinary initiative to create Australia’s first healthcare smart home. The teams they lead are creating what they describe as “intelligent assistive environments”, embedded in the fabric of our houses and apartments. 

“The concept is that your home pays attention to your health and wellbeing, measuring or observing aspects of your daily life relevant to health,” Professor Maeder explains. This might be useful if you’re at risk of falling, or a diabetic whose blood sugar level fluctuates – the house can keep an eye on you, reporting unusual behaviours or flagging an alert.

“If you’re an older person living alone, there’s a tendency sometimes to skip meals or be inactive. The health-smart home would take note and suggest you take action.”

In essence, he says, a smart home observes what you’re doing throughout the day to make sure you’re okay. “If you’re an older person living alone, there’s a tendency sometimes to skip meals or be inactive. The health-smart home would take note and suggest you take action.”

As well as embedded cameras and movement detectors, the kinds of sensors required might include wearable heart and blood-sugar monitors. There could even be data coming from the stove, fridge, shower or sink. 

Smart homes might also have conversational avatars and chatbots that act in place of humans for simple tasks, or even just interact to make you feel less lonely. They might also have smart walls – video screens that seamlessly connect you with distant relatives or social networks.

Devices such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa already recognise voices and obey basic commands. “The question is, how do we make it work in a healthcare setting, as opposed to online shopping, or showing you a movie? Those sorts of requests are much more specific,” says Professor Maeder. 

While devices already exist to monitor seniors’ health – such as wearable sensors that detect a fall – they are nearly all standalone technologies that can’t integrate into a larger intelligent system. This is what Professors Maeder and Williams’ teams are focusing on.  

“There are various sensors and separate bits of software and systems that can do all the parts of this, but what’s missing is actually putting it all together,” says Professor Williams. “It’s just our ability to integrate them that’s been the problem.”

While Professor Williams’ expertise lies in software, cybersecurity, health informatics and developing IT solutions, Professor Maeder’s experience lies in engineering as it relates to nursing and healthcare. “We complement each other well because Trish has a really strong systems theme, and I have a very strong technical bits-and-pieces focus,” he says.

The pair are working to create an intelligent overall surveillance system that can intervene to prevent problems before they occur. Processing this data would be automated in
real-time, looking for any warning signs to flag with a human operator or carer.

“But how can you visualise the data in a way that technicians or health people can look at it and say, ‘What does this mean?’ and decide what to do to help?” asks Professor Williams, whose team is now trying to solve that puzzle. 

While smart homes sound expensive, there are potentially huge savings to be made by minimising hospitalisations, managing chronic diseases and increasing healthy lifespans. “People who live more active, more satisfying, happy, fulfilling lives are more economically engaged as well,” Professor Maeder explains. “It’s better to keep the highest quality of life for as long as possible and hope for a relatively rapid but gentle decline at the end.”

Professors Maeder and Williams are also involved with the ARC Research Hub for Digital Enhanced Living, working with colleagues at Deakin University in Victoria and more than a dozen companies, each of which is involved with individual pieces of the smart home puzzle. The pair are also collaborating with a developer to produce a prototype smart home at Flinders’ Tonsley campus, and say a basic system could be up and running within five years.

“Western society is ageing fast. We can’t just wait for it to happen; we need to be ready,” says Professor Maeder. “If you can maintain people in their homes, living happily in familiar surroundings without distress, without duress, it’s a much better life.”