Increasing an individual’s quality of life via their intelligent homeThe hypothesis of this project is: can an individual’s quality of life be increasedby integrating “intelligent technology” into their home environment. This hypothesisis very broad, and hence the researchers will investigate it with regard to various,potentially over-lapping, sub-sections of the population. In particular, the project willfocus on sub-sections with health-care needs, because it is believed that thesesub-sections will receive the greatest benefit from this enhanced approach to housing.Two research questions flow from this hypothesis: what are the health-care issues thatcould be improved via “intelligent housing”, and what are the technological issuesneeding to be so lved to allow “intelligent housing” to be constructed? While a smallnumber of initiatives exist, outside Canada, which claim to investigate this area, nonehas the global vision of this area. Work tends to be in small areas with only a limitedidea of how the individual pieces contribute towards a greater goal. This project has avery strong sense of what it is trying to attempt, and believes that without this globaldirection the other initiatives will fail to address the large important issues describedwithin various parts of this proposal, and that with the correct global direction the sumof the parts will produce much greater rewards than the individual components. Thisnew field has many parallels with the field of business process engineering, wheremany products fail due to only considering a sub-set of the issues, typically thetechnology subset. Successful projects and implementations only started flow whenpeople started to realize that a holistic approach was e...
