Introduction And Remind The Main Objectives Of Smart Health Home

What are the main smart health home objectives?The problem of the aging of the population is particularly sensitive today, it logically leads communities to think of new solutions so that people with loss of autonomy can stay at home in the best conditions of comfort and security.

This state of the art for health smart home aims to help said working group to explore one of these areas of work, namely the concept of “increased home” and the development of “home support » Of people with loss of autonomy associated with it.

By looking at the etymological definition of the word ” home automation”, formed from the Latin “Domus” (the family home) and the suffix “tick”, which connotes electronics, computer science and automation, we can assimilate health smart home to all the new technologies present in the home, information and communication technologies (IT for the home). In this document, we will only discuss the description of health smart home associated with residential housing. In a broader sense, these technologies concern both residential and working housing, and by extension any building or network of buildings in the tertiary sector (offices, shops, cultural and leisure centers, hospitals, retirement homes, etc.). These technologies can be grouped under the term of building root.

It has now been almost 25 years (early 1980s) that we began to speak of the term smart home and that it is presented to us as the unifying and innovative element of our interiors of tomorrow. By force, health smart home ended up having a negative resonance, unsuccessful applications (phenomenon of gadgetization), functionalities too complicated to use, insufficient reliability, are some reasons. And yet, still perceived under this label 10 years ago, health smart home has evolved to find its way. Indeed, its use has been considerably simplified, the technical aspect is now disappearing behind the product effect, which itself is the bearer of new services.

We are therefore beginning to see today the applications that these techniques will allow tomorrow, in our daily life.

This new boom in health smart home is explained by the emergence of transverse fields of application such as energy: the fairly recent awareness of energy issues logically pushes health smart home to the front of the stage as it has so much to contribute in this domain ; but also the field of health and more specifically that of Home Support for people losing their autonomy.

Indeed, in these specific cases, we observe that the “gadget” aspect of health smart home is completely erased and that it is then perceived as a technological solution responding to a real need.

Health Smart Home Conception

The concept of “health smart home” as it will be understood throughout this study should first be posed. Indeed, if health smart home remains so vague for a large part of the population, it is also because no professional really agrees on the exact perimeter that it covers. So here we bring our vision established according to 4 levels of perimeter, namely:

Technical subsets:these are the basic building blocks of health smart home. It includes all categories of technological innovation products that can be cited as an integral part of health smart home.

The concept of atmosphere creation：this second scope makes it possible to group the different technical sub-groups into categories of Comfort, well-being and Security: Thermal, Acoustic, Visual, air quality, security, ease, emotivity, mobility; and together form the notion of creating an atmosphere within the home. They create the conditions for the development of user activities within the home.

User activities： here we are interested in the activity of the user in his home. That is to say that beyond the first perimeter of “atmosphere creation” developed above, we regroup the technical sub-assemblies but this time in relation to the very activities of the users. It is another approach which therefore makes it possible to see health smart home as a vector of application for domestic (and or professional) work and for leisure, in particular digital leisure, for communication, for energy savings, etc.

The concept of service：that is to say, we are seeking precisely to highlight here, “health smart home in the service of …” or instrumental vector of this service. For residential housing, four fundamental areas have been identified, namely health smart home for digital entertainment, security, energy savings and finally that which is the subject of this document, namely the home support and home hospitalization.

All of the elements developed above are illustrated in the following figure where we therefore show both the technical, functional and service scope of health smart home.

Figure 1 Technology – service Connection

This approach makes it possible to reverse the technological approach of health smart home into an approach centered on the needs and desires of the users, more precisely by being interested in the usage and organization aspects by going beyond the simple ergonomic aspects by looking at the social aspects, economic, environmental and societal.

In this document we will focus on services contributing to the “home support” of people losing their autonomy, but without losing sight of the fact that these services are related to leisure services, energy saving etc. Only a systemic vision of these questions can allow a global consideration of these questions, putting in perspective contradictory, even paradoxical situations. The linear formula of the document obliges to take into account the elements one after the other, the reader should not forget to link to understand.

First, this document will take a quick tour of major technological developments in homes in recent years to show why health smart home is coming back to the fore today and how it is a real contribution to everyday life. The term “Convergence” is a term that has come up repeatedly in recent years, so it makes sense, at a time when everything is digital in our homes, to wonder if “health smart home” also fits into this logic of convergence. It is therefore in this first development that we will expose our detailed vision of health smart home in the broad sense.

After this first part dealing with health smart home and its integration into the current technological landscape, we will make a state of the art both technical and technological health smart home. We will describe what a home network is in order to better understand how a health smart home network is integrated within this network.

Then in a second chapter, we have chosen to describe the different technical subsets of health smart home. This chapter will be broken down into three sub-parts that make up a health smart home system. Namely, the effectors which constitute the operative part of the system; the control elements (all of the control devices ranging from a simple switch to the light sensor coupled with a presence sensor); and finally, the communication brick which creates the link between these two elements.

Figure 2: Functional organization

Each of these parts describes precisely, from a technological, functional point of view and the problems it generates. Also in this second chapter devoted to the state of the art, we will end with a description of health smart home technologies, in particular those relating to home care for people with loss of autonomy (dependent elderly people, people with disabilities , people with long illness,…)

A third chapter describes both industrial and economic players in this field; we will focus our attention on the Aquitaine region.

After this overview of health smart home and its players, we finally develop the challenges of home maintenance. A state of the art of projects centered around home care is the basis of this chapter. An analysis of these projects allows us to develop the fundamental elements to take into account for this type of project.

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