A Multilayer Proposal to a Smart Home Applied to Healthcare

Smart home technology is an up-and-coming field of automation that integrates different areas, including sensing and electrical automation subsystems, devices, mechanical and hydraulic systems associated with sophisticated control and supervising. Recently these systems also received an extra mission to assist particular users, as older adults or patients who need intensive care. Such a challenge brings enormous pressure in developing engineering requirements that match automation goals with those raised by telemedicine and healthcare. Treating these smart healthcare homes as a system-of-systems, we have to consider a social goal that matches comfort, security, and flexibility with intensive care, protection, and telemedicine. The proposal presented in this paper is based on a multilayer approach: one layer is responsible for the physical home automation and the other with healthcare and the coupling with the final user, reinforcing a service design approach. Both are intelligent systems, which justifies using AI (Artificial Intelligence) planning, where automated processes achieve each system’s goals. That change substantially home-automation projects, which should be designed to be reused, and creates a link to healthcare and telemedicine. An illustrative case study is used to present the proposal based on a process that monitors old adults’ night sleep using home automation features associated with a planned healthcare process. Shortly we expect that the formal method presented here could be fully inserted in software tools (or in a commercially available system) to become an option for practical work.