Smart Home

Artificial intelligence is here. Machine learning is a reality. Scientists and researchers, like some at Washington State University, are creating smart systems that learn human patterns or behaviors and monitor whether humans, in a given situation, are acting appropriately.

In real everyday speak, that means, we could soon have a smart home that can do tasks without our help. Turn lights on and off. Download movies to taste. Monitor heating and cooling. Alert you if your bath water is too hot.

On the horizon, these technolgies will help the earth and, potentially, older people and people with disabilites. Here's how:

• We will save energy and be more Earth friendly with conservative green living.

• Our homes will be safer and easier to operate.

• People with disabilities will encounter fewer challenges in their home lives.

And most interesting to me, aging people who begin to develop cognitive problems -- thinking issues, memory challenges -- will probably be able to remain at home longer in the future, managing their problems with artificial intelligence to help when humans aren't available.

Aging Baby Boomers Need to Get Smart
I talked with a fascinating young woman the other day about how artificial intelligence, machine learning and smart environments fit in with the aging of baby boomers. Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe, Ph.D., a professor in the psychology department at Washington State University, was kind enough to explain her research to me.
Professor Maureen's special focus area is aging and dementia, helping maintain independence as long as possible. We'll thank her in time, I think.
"The project," she told me, "is at the earliest stages – looking at successfully monitoring, in a smart home environment, whether a stove burner is on, water is on, cabinets are open, or the resident hasn't gotten out of bed all day."

The hope, for Maureen and her co-reaseacher Diane Cook, Huie-Rogers Chair Professor, is to do this without being invasive. No videos or two-way mirrored glass. No objects to wear. The goal is a safe, normal feeling home.

"For example," Professor Maureen said, "we have a house set up on campus, with student's living in it. Machine learning technology is absorbing their patterns of regular living. It's seeing that we are creatures of habit and we repeat behaviors routinely, whether we know it or not."

As early as this month, the research team plans to add people with very mild impairment and the smart home will learn to recognize unsafe living errors or unsafe situations. The machine learning system, called CASA (Computer Augmentation for Smart Architectonics) will, hopefully, detect those instances and intervene. It'll be a cueing intervention – a light or sound, perhaps - that encourages the resident to change the unsafe condition.

Professor Diane's published reports say the research program's goal is to develop interventions to help older people with progressive dementia, like Alzheimer’s disease, delay disability and increase quality-of-life.

She's investigating the relationship between memory problems and everyday functioning, with smart environment technologies to help people compensate in daily life for declining memory.

Professors Maureen and Diane are not the only people working on this technology but they are ahead of other studies.

Their project began two years ago. They hope to complete one or two more model homes by summer's end, 2009. In future, this type of smart home may be adapted therapeutically for patients with diabetes, traumatic brain injury and even drug or alcohol rehabilitation situations.

Being a senior citizen in near-future America may be a different story than it is now. The worry about what to do with our generation, one of mankind's largest, as we age and need intervention, may be solved before we know it.