News & Events
"SMART HOME" TO BE UNVEILED AT OAK HAMMOCK SUBDIVISION
January 18, 2005
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- When was the last time you saw Gatorade at a major sporting event? When was the last time you used a personal computer with a Microsoft Windows operating system? As products, Gatorade and Microsoft Windows have several things in common: they revolutionized the industries in which they were developed, they brought a tremendous amount of name recognition to the organizations which developed them and they are ubiquitous. In most cases they improve the lives of their users.
A research team based at the University of Florida is developing a technological product with the potential to generate the name recognition for UF that Gatorade has, while doing for home living, in part, what Microsoft has done for personal computing. Most significantly, this technology aims to improve the quality of life for people who need assistance in order to live independently at home.
This product is the smart house, a living space which employs a multitude of features one would expect to see in an episode of "The Jetsons." Such features may include automated lighting, communication and climate systems, kitchen shelves that automatically lower themselves to ease access for a wheelchair bound person, floors with sensors that alert loved ones when an elderly inhabitant falls, a medicine cabinet which monitors the use of prescription drugs, a doorknob which records the user's temperature and many others.
The smart house, being developed by the Gator-Tech Smart House Project
under the leadership of Dr. Abdelsalam Helal, uses pervasive computing technology
to create an assistive living environment to enable elderly or disabled persons
to live independently. Other research teams are developing their own take
on a smart house, but the Gator-Tech Smart House Project is unique due to
the clinical focus of its approach. The Gator-Tech team has strong ties to
the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) and to the National
Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR). 
"The goal of the project is to exploit technology to achieve independence for the aging and disabled population," explained Dr. Helal, CISE Professor and Director of Technology Development of the RERC Center on Technology for Successful Aging.
In addition to Dr. Helal, the Gator-Tech Smart House Project team includes Dr. William Mann of the Department of Occupational Therapy as well as several CISE and ECE graduate and undergraduate students. The Department of Psychology is also involved in the project.
The technology being developed by this team is essentially an operating system for a home and the various devices which carry out its functionality. Pervasive computing technology controls and coordinates the operation of the many devices in a smart house in the same way that an operating system controls the functions of a personal computer and its external hardware. Dr. Helal and his colleagues refer to this house operating system as middleware.
A defining feature of the middleware being developed by the Gator-Tech Smart House Project team is the utilization of plug-and-play technology. This feature allows new smart house devices to be added to the system in the same way that external hardware may be added to a PC without the need for system-external drivers or software. The benefit is that as new devices are available they can be added to a smart house's system without the need for system integration or further engineering.
The motivation behind the utilization of plug-and-play technology is illustrative of the basic goal of this project: to make life easier. Dr. Helal and his team want their take on a smart house to be affordable and scalable. If updating a device on a smart house requires the services of several engineers and further system integration, the project will be too expensive to be of any use to most elderly or disabled persons.
In addition to affordability, Dr. Helal wants the Gator-Tech smart house to be accessible to the masses. As such, once the technology is fully developed he hopes to market it under the name "Smart House in a Box." He predicts that consumers will find "Smart House in a Box" in their local Home Depot within five years.
Dr. Helal envisions that "Smart House in a Box" will be available in two varieties. One version will allow a traditional home to be retrofitted with smart house technology. The other will be used to install smart house technology during the construction of a new home. In both cases everything needed for a smart house will be packaged together in such a way as to make the installation as user friendly as possible.
It is hoped that once smart house technology is readily available to consumers, it will help to lessen the strain that the U.S. Medicaid system is currently under. Dr. Helal said that the smart house technology being developed by the Gator-Tech team will allow persons who currently use Medicaid funds to pay for various means of assisted living to live more affordably in their own homes.
Smart house technology can be experienced first-hand at the UF Gator-Tech SmartHouse grand opening on Friday, January 28. The demonstration smart house will be open to the public from 10:00 a.m until noon at the Oak Hammock at UF. Tours and refreshments will be provided. All interested parties must RSVP by Friday, January 21. For more information or to RSVP, please contact Marie Emmerson at (352) 265-8097 or emmerson@vpha.ufl.edu.
Dr. Abdelsalam Helal, who goes by the name Sumi, conducts research in pervasive computing, mobile computing and networking, and internet computing. He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and Automatic Control from Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, in 1991. Dr. Helal became a faculty member of the CISE in 1998.
Major funding for the Gator-Tech Smart House Project is being provided
by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, the National
Science Foundation and Intel.
Source: Sumi Helal, 352-392-6845, helal@cise.ufl.edu
Writer: Danny Rigby, drigby@ufl.edu
