Introduction

Smart homes, when appropriately designed and incorporating suitable technologies, may be an ultimate goal by which older people can achieve independent living. Such a vision is beginning to emerge as smart homes are considered alongside developments in telemedicine, telecare, activity and lifestyle monitoring (discussed in Chapters Twelve and Thirteen). Social alarms can be seen as at the core of smart homes.

As noted by Fisk (2001, p 101) there is no single accepted definition of a smart home. At its broadest, a smart home is one where smart technologies are installed and where those technologies facilitate automatic or user-initiated communication involving a range of appliances, sensors, actuators and switches. Such communication takes place in ways that can empower people and, in so doing, improve their quality of life. Implicit in this definition is the notion that the same empowerment and improvement in quality of life would not be achieved in ordinary homes despite the fact that most of these would have a range of devices that operate independently of each other. Some would benefit from the presence of a social alarm. There is, in other words, something to be gained by communication in a way that adds to that offered by social alarms.

This chapter explores the importance of that new way of communicating, specifically relates it to the needs of older people, and considers its impact on social alarms. In doing so it attempts to capture the ways in which smart technologies can help to promote engagement and social inclusion as well as support the independent living of their users. In addition, however, the chapter points to the danger of such technologies removing choice and control from the user through an over-reliance on automation and the transfer, without proper consent, of personal information to third parties. This latter danger is of particular concern on account of the use of smart technologies to effect what is known as lifestyle monitoring, explored in Chapter Thirteen.

Lifestyle monitoring, it can be noted, was at the heart of an initiative managed by Anchor Trust and British Telecom, which sought to “develop, implement and evaluate a system that could monitor the lifestyles of people in their own homes and look for deviations from a normal pattern of behaviour” (Porteus and Brownsell, 2000, p 26).