Leaving an infirm, elderly relative alone at home can be a torment for both the senior citizen, who may face inconvenient or even life-threatening situations, and the family, who worries about the health and safety of their loved one. Unfortunately, this troubling scenario is becoming common in China and other Asian countries, as these nations join the worldwide trend of aging populations. China’s Harbin Institute of Technology (opens in new tab) (HIT) has launched a program to aid senior citizens who live alone. Called Smart Home Technologies, the program uses the Microsoft Research Lab of Things (opens in new tab) (LoT), a platform that facilitates research involving connected devices in homes. The program builds on the impressive progress that has been made in using technology for safety monitoring and emergency detection, and it offers great hope to elderly people and their loved ones.
Professor Nie controls the lights in room via the Smart Home platform based on LoT.
Joining the Lab of Things community
PODCAST SERIES
The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited
Join Microsoft’s Peter Lee on a journey to discover how AI is impacting healthcare and what it means for the future of medicine.
At the core of the program is a model smart home equipped with sensors that compile data on the well-being of the home’s inhabitants. This model home serves as a test environment for researchers from China and other Asian countries. HIT Professor Lanshun Nie, the program’s primary investigator, explains that the goal is to create alternatives to full-time home surveillance systems, which are prohibitively expensive for most families.
The first step for HIT researchers was to see how home sensors are being used to monitor senior citizens in Western countries. Then the HIT program developed a smart home environment that took into account cultural nuances specific to the behaviors and treatment of the aging populations in Asian societies. Nie worked with Arjmand Samuel, Microsoft Research’s senior research program manager for LoT, to design this Asian-specific test environment. Samuel also connected Nie with LoT researchers around the world, so that the HIT team could evaluate and adapt their deployment approaches. “With its diverse, global research community, Lab of Things enables research rooted in particular cultural contexts but driven by global trends”, says Samuel.
Nie and Samuel stress that it is critical to study different software frameworks connecting multiple heterogonous devices and multiple networks. Furthermore, these frameworks must support many concurrent applications; enable reliable data collection; and communicate between home devices, the cloud, and smartphones—and they must make it easy for developers to create third-party applications. The beauty of LoT, says Nie, is that it helps HIT researchers build such frameworks to provide a closed-loop service that enables researchers to focus on the sensor and data service, while LoT manages tasks like sensor registration, monitoring, and data transition.
Professor Nie and his student, Xue Li, test the robotic trolley.
Smart home in action: the robotic trolley
One of the first prototypes to emerge from the Smart Home Technologies is an intelligent robotic trolley that provides medical support to elderly people—sort of like an early version of the healthcare robot, Baymax, from the recent animated movie Big Hero 6. The trolley is designed to carry medications and offer reminders to take them on time. “Taking medicines is important, but sometimes older folks forget,” observes Nie. “We are also designing the trolley to recognize and react to some urgent situations,” he adds. “When the sensors detect a medical emergency—for instance, an asthma attack—the trolley will be activated and deliver the medicine the patient needs.” Nie further explains that the trolley might also use data from a Kinect sensor to detect and respond to abnormal situations, such as when an older adult falls or convulses.
According to Nie, the Kinect sensor, shown here, could help detect emergencies.
Getting from the trolley to a full-blown health and safety home monitoring system will take some work, but the HIT team and their LoT collaborators at Microsoft Research are convinced that Smart Home Technologies is on the right track. And for countless elderly shut-ins and their anxious families, that day cannot come too soon.
—Bei Li, Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research
Learn more