Three-button gateway smart home interface (TrueSmartface) for elderly: Design, development and deployment

Abstract

With the growing age, the older adults experience gradual health, physical as well cognitive, declining. Oftentimes, the degree of developed health concerns is severe enough for the inevitable need of most likely a permanent caregiver or resource-rich but overly expensive assisted or nursing facility. The increasingly technical richness of the science advancements helps elevate at least most aspects of human life and the existence of smart home is one such outcome that has attained popularity, maturity and acceptability over the short period of time, especially in the communities of seniors, where it promises them an independent daily living. The smart home is an intelligent, technical, and automated cyber-physical infrastructure, which consists of a number of appliances and devices embedded or attached in physical environment. Some of them will be contextually-triggered, however, there is also a potential need for an efficient interface (graphical or non-graphical) to operate some. The design of such graphical interfaces is not so rudimentary, rather ought to be a comprehensive human-centered design that imposes very minimal physical and cognitive stress on a senior inhabitant. In this research work, we design and develop one such graphical interface (apt for desktop, laptop and mobile devices), which is based on some newly devised hypotheses, validated through literature and informal surveys. At every stage of the design, a three-button constraint is precisely persevered and the interface is successfully deployed into the Smart Home Lab at Iowa State University.