Fundamental Issues in the Design of Smart Home for Elderly Healthcare

摘要

A smart home for the elderly must provide comfort and care while protecting their safety and privacy. The current advances in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technology offers both opportunities and challenges for elderly care. Sensors and actuators of different types and functionalities in WSN should be made to collect data and manage it according to the set of healthcare domain policies and privacy rules demanded by the elderly. Because most of the sensor types used within the home use electricity rather than battery as they can use the power from the building itself, resource constraints is not an issue in providing hardware and software-based solutions to protect the elderly home. Based on the concept of Sensor Design Pattern (SDP) and Context-aware Role-based Access Control (CRBAC) technique, this paper explains defensive methods for most of the common threats that arise in a smart home WSN.