Application of smart home and smartwatch to assist elders in home care scenario

Many elders choose to live independently in their own houses. This research aims to apply home automation and wearable device technology to assist the elders in the home care scenario. Unlike many research in this field, we apply our home automation system in the real or physical house. There are four main features of our smart home: door control, lighting control, temperature control, and gas leakage detection. Six Wemos D1 minis are used as the local controllers for each sensor and actuator, while a RaspberryPi 4 is utilized as the main controller. NodeRed is chosen as the tool to integrate various components in our system, so a web dashboard can be used to monitor and control the smart house. We also developed a mobile sensing platform called SmartSens. Samsung Galaxy Watch is used as a smartwatch worn by the elder. We then conduct simple experiments where the elder controls our smart home in manual mode successfully. The automatic mode is also running well. Additionally, heart rate and step count data are also successfully collected from the smartwatch. By combining a smart house and a smartwatch, the elder who lives by himself can be monitored by caregivers via the internet.