译文标题 Increasing an individual’s quality of life via their intelligent home
原文标题 智能家居能提高个人的生活品质
作 者朱敏玲 译 名Zhu min, ling. 国 籍中国
原文出处 电子世界
Increasing an individual’s quality of life via their intelligent home
The hypothesis of this project is: can an individual’s quality of life be increased by
integrating “intelligent technology” into their home environment. This hypothesis is
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 will
focus on sub-sections with health-care needs, because it is believed that these sub-
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 that could
be improved via “intelligent housing”, and what are the technological issues needing to
be solved to allow “intelligent housing” to be constructed? While a small number of
initiatives exist, outside Canada, which claim to investigate this area, none has the
global vision of this area. Work tends to be in small areas with only a limited idea of
how the individual pieces contribute towards a greater goal. This project has a very
strong sense of what it is trying to attempt, and believes that without this global
direction the other initiatives will fail to address the large important issues described
within various parts of this proposal, and that with the correct global direction the sum
of the parts will produce much greater rewards than the individual components. This
new field has many parallels with the field of business process engineering, where many
products fail due to only considering a sub-set of the issues, typically the technology
subset. Successful projects and implementations only started flow when people started
to realize that a holistic approach was essential. This holistic requirement also applies to
the field of “smart housing”; if we genuinely want it to have benefit to the community
rather than just technological interest. Having said this, much of the work outlined
below is extremely important and contains a great deal of novelty within their individual
topics.
Health-Care and Supportive housing:
To date, there has been little coordinated research on how “smart house”
technologies can assist frail seniors in remaining at home, and/or reduce the costs
experienced by their informal caregivers. Thus, the purpose of the proposed research is
to determine the usefulness of a variety of residential technologies in helping seniors
maintain their independence and in helping caregivers sustain their caring activities.
The overall design of the research is to focus on two groups of seniors. The first is
seniors who are being discharged from an acute care setting with the potential for
reduced ability to remain independent. An example is seniors who have had hip
replacement surgery. This group may benefit from technologies that would help them
become adapted to their reduced mobility. The second is seniors who have a chronic
health problem such as dementia and who are receiving assistance from an informal
caregiver living at a distance. Informal caregivers living at a distance from the cared-for
senior are at high risk of caregiver burnout. Monitoring the cared-for senior for health