Smart home, robots, and robotic arms for elderly and disabled persons: A lab experiment research agenda

Abstract

The Chief Executive's Policy addresses direct Hong Kong moving towards a smart city. Although the smart home is one of the major features in smart city, understanding on smart home is limited among lay people in Hong Kong. Elderly and disabled persons are no exception. The smart home gadgets are useful among these two special groups. For example, a water sensor installed in the washing basin can inform the elderly who forget to turn off the water closet, carbon monoxide sensor alerts the resident if there is a gas leakage problem. Bed sensor can send messages to care takers' apps when the elderly is suspected to be fainted in the bed. The smart home robots companion lonely elderly who may not have companions with them. Video recording system can inform the caretakers in case of fall incidents so that appropriate and timely action can be taken. On the other hand, a voice controllable system can help disabled persons control the electrical appliances such as television, and play music in the whole room by using their voice rather than their hand. It helps the blind people and those who cannot move around the room easily or have limited hand function. Robotic arms on wheelchairs help disabled persons with limited hand function to grab things on the floor, eat and drink. Facial recognition systems prevent strangers enter the home via facial recognition systems. This research agenda proposes to (1) build a sample smart home in a University to demonstrate the possible future direction in smart home. It incorporates three generations of the smart home gadgets (a) the smart home gadgets which are connected by a network system; (b) smart gadgets which have a certain level of artificial intelligence which can reply to our questions; (c) smart home robots which can move around the home to move around the home quickily on behalf of the elderly and disabled persons. (2) Install smart home gadgets at an affordable price for 200 households with elderly/disabled persons to inform the elderly and disabled persons about the possibility of these tools helping their daily lives. Practically speaking, the project can provide valuable insights to policy makers when they implement smart city, elderly, and disabled persons’ policies. Caretakers can know more about the current-state-of-art in smart home gadgets, which may reduce their everyday work. This can also raise the awareness of the elderly and disabled persons’ needs in Hong Kong. Academically speaking, the smart home gadgets installed in the smart home laboratory shall provide important information to university researchers to study people’s behaviour/reaction to the smart home. Whilst we can find many of the smart home laboratories in overseas universities such as the University of West Florida and Iowa State University, we cannot find any smart home laboratory designed for elderly and disabled persons. This research agenda will fill the research gap.