CogniHome – A Connected Smarter Home for Healthier Lives

Supervisor: Dr Atm Alam

Research group(s): Networks

Rapid growth of aged population has caused an immense increase in demand for personal care, particularly for people with chronic conditions such as dementia. According to Alzheimer’s Society, there are estimated 35.6 million people living with dementia worldwide while there are 850,00 people with dementia in the UK, which will rise to 1 million by 2025 and the financial cost of dementia to the UK is £26 billion per annum. However, technologies can be enablers for aging-in-place to mitigate the care costs and, therefore, the development of new innovative aging-in-place and caregiving technologies is utmost importance for healthier living. Recent advances in technologies specially the Internet of Things (IoT), have given rise to the smart home paradigm, thus enabling the remote monitoring and controlling of those smart devices. On the other hand, among numerous applications of the IoT like the smart home, healthcare represents one of the most attractive areas and the IoT has the potential to provide a unique solution to the healthcare systems. However, neither a smart home nor a typical IoT-based healthcare system is inevitably supposed to offer specialised services to people with dementia. Adding to these requirements, security and privacy issues are more acute in this environment. Therefore, a novel smart home design especially for people with dementia is of paramount importance to promote equal well-being for all. As such, this research project will investigate to design and develop an intelligent home for dementia care by considering the IoT ecosystems, a liquid IoT architecture (that sensors are spread everywhere within the home), which is reliable, secure, inter-operable and programmable, powered by artificial intelligence. As a consequence, the following set of objectives of the CogniHome project is expected to underpin the overarching aim of the project: - To investigate and determine the key technological requirements based on practical, cognitive and social factors to improve the usability of technology for people with dementia. - To design and develop a liquid communication architecture with enabling edge computing for a unified real-time connectivity among IoT devices for monitoring and providing dementia care from anywhere at any time. - To design and develop an intelligent user-informed platform to organize, prioritise and streamline data to ensure security and privacy while presenting them properly for the best use of the resources.