RE: Millenium Homes [VERY LONG]

[Keith Doxey <keith.doxey@xxxxxxx>]

Hi David

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Paterson (Pixi) [mailto:david.paterson@xxxxxxx]
>
> Ooh, was that at the Edinburgh Science Festival.

No. The lecture was in the Lecture Theatre at my place of work. BT Adastral
Park, Martlesham, Suffolk. He did talk about the Science Festival and it
sounds like just the kind of place for me to visit :-))

> > (snip)
> >
> >What he described was a "Caring Home" designed to assist
the
> elderly
> This is very much along the lines of what I've been trying to
> design for
> the last few years.
> 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.

As it was designed as a retrofit system it uses wireless technology and
"disposable" sensors with a 3 year life. Presumably it uses some
sort of
coding similar to the iButtons whereby when you add a sensor it just learns
the ID of it and monitors it. He also said there could be purpose built
millenium homes just as there are existing sheltered communities.

He showed examples of work being done with passive IR technology where a
ceiling mounted sensor took a heat picture of the room and the occupant
could be clearly seen sitting on the sofa as a reasonably sized dot, by
comparison, when the person fell there was an eliptical shape indicating a
large surface area. Obviously that by itself is insufficient to distinguish
between someone who has fallen or someone lying on the sofa, but input
would
also be monitored from motion sensors as well, again prompting for a voice
response if the system felt it was necessary. The subject of pets was also
mentioned and because older people generally have small dogs or cats it was
quite easy to ignore them unlike normal PIR sensors.



> 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.
>

Sadly it wasnt open to the general public


Millenium Homes is a consortium of Brunel University, BT and several other
companies involved in Healthcare and Security etc. There should be some
interesting info around soon.

Keith


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