Smart Residence

The first showcase addresses the issue of energy saving in the private home, depending on the actual usage of the building.

Luke is a 45-year-old senior engineer living with his wife Alice, a 42-year-old lawyer, and their two young children, Lucy and Oliver, which are respectively 6 and 9 years old, in a symbIoTe enabled smart home near the city.

A typical day starts with the whole family getting up about 7am, preparing themselves before going to work (or school). When the alarm clock rings, lux level is managed to a predefined comfort value, by controlling dimmer lights and automated curtains; then Luke and Alice move to the next room, waking up their children, and beginning to prepare breakfast in the kitchen. When they enter in a room, virtual objects (belonging to different system and protocol domains) are combined to keep temperature and lights to values according to the selected scenario. After preparing, at the time they all leave the house, the smart system recognizes the departure and modifies levels to “empty home” new schema. This will be translated into a switching off lights and fan coil and setting all devices in energy saving mode.

In the afternoon, Lucy and Oliver come back home from school, with the young 21-year-old babysitter Emily. Emily, like almost every person of the same age, is very familiar with the use of smartphones and tablets, and is allowed to use the home tablet. With the symbIoTe compliant app, the home tablet can be used from the girl as an interface, which will automatically reconfigure according to the controllable cyber-physical systems (CPS) in range (e.g., TV remote command, adaptive light switch). Depending on the room where Emily is, and the devices in the sensing area, she is able to interact with the smart home. In the meanwhile, of course, the home has automatically come back to the “user-at-home” situation, regulating again dimmer lights and temperature at the comfort values.

These examples show the potentiality of a smart home, and the variety of functions that can be conceived and implemented under a symbIoTe environment.

The second showcase highlights how smart IoT environments can be used for healthcare and how the data can be easily integrated in existing health platforms.

Claire is a 79-year old retired secretary living with her husband in some urban symbIoTe-enabled smart home. Claire suffers from chronic heart failure and is on a strict regimen of medication prescribed by her doctor. Her husband, John, 81 years old, is a retired engineer who recently experienced a fall.  He is now ordered to perform regular exercises for a period of 3 weeks, while his fall-risk is monitored by a general practitioner (physician).

A typical day starts with John getting up early around 6am. He enters the kitchen, where he left a tablet on the kitchen table last night. A notification is delivered to the tablet to remind John to perform his daily gait measurement. When he enters the bathroom, a smart gait measurement device (e.g. a smart carpet) automatically recognizes that he has entered the room, John performs the short walk and the results are correctly assigned to his personal health data. 2 hours later Claire wakes up, goes into the bathroom, where she is instantly reminded to take her medication by a context aware device, which is using the information from the symbIoTe enabled home to identify the best suitable time and location to do that. She also steps on the smart carpet during her morning routine and is then asked if she wants to add the measurements to her health data, as she is not required to record it.

In the afternoon Bob, an old school friend of Claire, swings by at their place to play cards. His location-based smartphone recognizes the smart tablet in Claire’s living room as a suitable device to complete the request of Bob’s physician to answer some questions about his current wellbeing, which are overdue for some days now. Bob is answering these simple questions on the large and easy to use tablet while chatting with Claire saying what an exciting time it is to be living in. In the meantime, the symbIoTe enabled home has detected the presence of several persons in the living room and automatically adjusts the room temperature by 2°C to ensure a comfortable environment.

After having a long and activity-packed day, Claire and John go to sleep. John wakes up in the middle of the night, in order to go to the bathroom. symbIoTe automatically detects this and turns on night lights in the house.