Re: Millenium Homes [VERY LONG]

["David Paterson (Pixi)" <david.paterson@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 13 Apr 2000 21:56:38 +0100, you wrote:

>Hi All,
>
>Today I attended an excellent lecture given by Professor Heinz Wolfe of
>Brunel University (and Great Egg Race fame).

Ooh, was that at the Edinburgh Science Festival.  I plan to go every
year to some of the talks, but never seem to get organised.  I'm
regretting missing this one.

> (snip)
>
>What he described was a "Caring Home" designed to assist the
elderly and
>semi-infirm to continue to live an independant and dignified existance
in
>their own home rather than to shove then into a home and wait for them
to
>die.
>
> (snip description of features)

This is very much along the lines of what I've been trying to design for
the last few years.  Although many of the ideas would be just as useful
to people with disabilities, or even to fully able inhabitants too.

Most of the impetus for this started after my mother had a stroke a few
years ago, and lay for several hours before help arrived.  Even though
she was in "sheltered" accommodation with an alarm, like many
people
probably do, she had left her alarm pendant on the bedside table.

It seems to me that some simple room occupancy / movement tracking
system, matching inputs against expected patterns, could recognise many
of the situations described, but at present there doesn't seem to be any
reliable way to track someone around a house.

The cost of CCD and other cameras is falling though, and with some
simple image processing I'm hoping that something like this will become
cost-effective in the next few years.

I really wish I'd gone to that lecture :{  There's still a few good ones
coming up, so I'll maybe catch a couple this weekend.

David P.

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