Integrated Sensing Devices for Disease Prevention and Health Alerts in Smart Homes

The rapid development of elderly population is changing demographics in Europe and North America and imposes barriers to healthcare systems that may reduce the quality of service. Telemedicine is a potential solution supporting the real-time and remote monitoring of subjects as well as bidirectional communication with medical personnel for care delivery at the point of perception. Smart homes are private spaces where young or elderly, healthy or diseased-suffering, or disabled individuals spend the majority of their time. Hence, turning smart homes into diagnostic spaces for continuous, real-time, and unobtrusive health monitoring allows disease prediction and prevention before the subject perceives any symptoms. According to the World Health Organization, health, well-being, and quality of life assessment require the monitoring of interwoven domains such as environmental, behavioral, physiological, and psychological. In this work, we give an overview on sensing devices and technologies utilized in smart homes, which can turn the home into a diagnostic space. We consider the integration of sensing devices from all four WHO domains with respect to raw and processed data, transmission, and synchronization. We apply the bus-based scalable intelligent system to construct a hybrid topology for hierarchical multi-layer data fusion. This enables event detection and alerting for short-time as well as prediction and prevention for long-time monitoring.