Smart Home Goal Feature Model -- A guide to support Smart Homes for Ageing in Place

Abstract

Smart technologies are significant in supporting ageing in place for elderly. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), it provides peace of mind, enabling the elderly to continue living independently. Elderly use smart technologies for entertainment and social interactions, this can be extended to provide safety and monitor health and environmental conditions, detect emergencies and notify informal and formal caregivers when care is needed. This paper provides an overview of the smart home technologies commercially available to support ageing in place, the advantages and challenges of smart home technologies, and their usability from elderlys perspective. Synthesizing prior knowledge, we created a structured Smart Home Goal Feature Model (SHGFM) to resolve heuristic approaches used by the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) at aged care facilities and healthcare researchers in adapting smart homes. The SHGFM provides SMEs the ability to (i) establish goals and (ii) identify features to set up strategies to design, develop and deploy smart homes for the elderly based on personalised needs. Our model provides guidance to healthcare researchers and aged care industries to set up smart homes based on the needs of elderly, by defining a set of goals at different levels mapped to a different set of features.