AbstractsEngineering

Smart Home, or the automation of home and household activity, has been believed to be the home of future. It makes the operation of home apparatus much easier, more flexible and comfortable by enabling control at a certain range of distance, time and magnitude. After decades of gradual development, this domain is recently experiencing a rapid growth, owing to the booming technologies. Not only our home and household activities are becoming more automatic, but many other aspects of our daily living, such as communication, entertainment, health care and fitness, etc., are also becoming more convenient. In response to this trend, a new vision for our future living with more emphasis on wireless and intelligence has been brought up, depicting a home-based but not home-bounded daily living automation which provides the needed services at the right time and right ‘amount’ regardless of the users’ location, and most importantly, with easy operation. To differentiate this vision from simple home-automation, the term ‘Smart Living’ is coined as a replacement for ‘Smart Home’ (Nikayin, Skournetou et al. 2011). As the global ageing problem exacerbates, Smart Living is promising to solve the problem of lacking resources for elderly care. Nevertheless, its realization in the field of elderly care can be challenging due to the cooperation problem among the various stakeholders. In this research we will tackle several aspects of the cooperation problem that can potentially be encountered by the Smart Living projects in elderly care via a thorough review on relevant literature and a case study on an in-home assisted living project in Finland.