Home of the Future

 

By Guy Kasier

Chapter 1 of this Domotics Course is published as an eBook so you can scroll the different pages using the titles below. The full chapter is also available as a PDF for download.

By Guy Kasier

Safety and security are ever more at the forefront of people’s minds as shown by many studies into the additional support techniques needed for the elderly who wish to be independent and continue living at home for longer. This is not so much about protection against burglary, but rather protecting the person himself, reflecting the fact that, when the elderly live at home alone, a major concern is that they will not be able to contact anyone were they to get ill, fall or for whatever reason suddenly to need help. Rapid and even automatically triggered communication with care providers, volunteers, family, and the like is essential. In this article we will look at what is currently available to set this up, always bearing in mind that the choice of a given solution should be tailored to suit the mental and physical condition, the needs and requirements of the individual in question.

(All rights reserved on illustrations by TeleZorgSupport B.V.)

By Guy Kasier

With an ageing European population and there being fewer young people in the population, we will have to ensure that, where they wish to do so, the elderly can continue to live at home independently for longer. There are various ways this can be achieved but it is not the aim to swamp independent elderly people with a mass of unwanted technical gizmos they will probably never use, rather, in the first instance, professional social workers (the GP, district nurse, home help, volunteers, carers) will want to assess the individual’s needs to determine what techniques can be usefully applied to a specific case. As someone, for example, in a wheelchair will have different needs to someone who is in the early stages of dementia, this article will only address the basic, commonly relevant functions that can be applied to every home or apartment where the independent elderly live. We will also make a rough estimate of the costs.

 

By Guy Kasier

Personal safety and ensuring the security of the home are two main concerns for the elderly when they are living at home – the principal equipment that can provide solutions for both issues are sensors; this article reviews many if not all of the types of sensors that can be applied where integrated home systems are used to enable the elderly to live independently for longer. There is a wide range of available sensors and whilst it is either not necessary or perhaps not practical to install all of them in every home, as the type and the number of sensors will greatly depend on the individual’s degree of independence and ability to cope as well as their specific health situation, a joint decision between the resident and the carers will go to compile a check-list of the requirements on which the choice of sensors to be installed or used can be based.

To date, whilst in most cases traditional sensors and some specific sensors will be used, unfortunately many stand-alone systems exist in the sensor world with each manufacturer producing their own system that is either incompatible or not inter-operable with other systems. Certain systems can be acquired to assist with a specific problem, but, when and if a new care requirement presents itself, an additional system may have to be installed. How much better would it be were it to be possible simply to connect an additional component to the existing system. It is therefore also necessary that manufacturers/developers not only work on what they can technically achieve, but also take into account the increasing need for inter-operability and to take into account the whole panorama of what is entailed by independent living for the elderly in the context of the progressive challenges and demands of the ageing process.

If you or anyone you know is affected by or involved in any these issues we would welcome your comments and any further ideas or information about the advances that are being made in this sector, please contact us.

By Guy Kasier, E&D Systems

This briefing paper presents the findings of the project 'Telemedicine and the consequences for urban planning and development' running from 2003 to 2007 in 4 countries. Its main findings are presented below:

Using telemedicine applications reduces the effects on the patient that can be caused by the place where care can be provided and by time-related factors. When drafting or modifying an urban plan, consideration will have to be given to a change in attitude towards this subject. As telemedicine affects the daily life of people (patients and carers), there is a direct influence on the daily routine, on transport requirements, on the planning of housing and accommodation and on the planning of healthcare services. Today, however, certain influences are still difficult to predict due to a lack of information and research. The change in transport requirements, for example, will depend largely on the way people use (or do not use) ICT’s potential in this regard. However, as the need for “face to face” contact will never entirely disappear, neither will classic transport functions, although, in theory, that is also a possibility.

Politicians and policy-makers must provide the necessary resources to explore telemedicine applications properly. Urban and rural-planners will also have to develop new models in which telemedicine has a place and, along with care-providers (doctors, nurses, etc.) they will also have to be adequately trained to understand the potential for and use of these new technologies. As in many other cases, the will to change and develop will be vitally important to implementing these new technologies.

This Interreg IIIC Telemedicine project provided an impetus to investigate the influence of telemedicine on urban planning. However, a great many questions remain unanswered. At the end of this conference, the closing sessions consequently highlighted the options of starting a European project to investigate the relationships between an ageing population group, an increasing number of people presenting chronic medical conditions with the promising developments in telemedicine as they relate to both urban and remote rural areas’ planning.

Based on a Discussion Webinar, Friday, 18 January 2008

How best to heat a house is a question that is often hotly debated. On one side, it is a purely personal choice affecting our daily life and personal comfort and productivity. But on the other side, given the enormous amount of heating energy the global built environment is consuming, it is also an important topic in the sphere of social responsibility. Residential heating is an area with great potential for carbon emission reductions.

A new trend due to the widespread discussions regarding climate change mitigation is the design and construction of low-energy houses. What importance does electric heating hold in this new market environment? Electric heating used to be seen as evil by environment-conscious consumers. But are their arguments still valid? Or has the common sense on this topic turned into common nonsense?

Leonardo Energy broached this subject on a Discussion Webinar on 18 January 2008. The following are a few points attracting particular attention that are partly derived from this discussion.

These 2 case studies demonstrate that high-quality rewiring of domestic electrical systems in older residential buildings can yield a significant increase in home comfort.

We describe some examples of electrical refurbishment work aimed at illustrating how electricians can tap into this market.

We begin in the city of Jena in Thuringia in the east of Germany. Many of the residential areas in Jena are situated on the slopes of the Saale valley. One such development comprises detached and semi-detached houses all built in the 1930s and 40s.

These solid, comfortable residences were built with typical German thoroughness, but with electrical systems that reflect the requirements of that time.

For its time, the electrical installation work was fairly modern using copper wires within a protective metal sheath. However, each house was fitted with only a few wiring circuits comprising two copper conductors with a 0.5 mm² cross-section and protected solely by a 6 A fuse.

One such semi-detached house is owned by the seventy-year-old pensioner Herta Engels:

The second case takes us to the Rapp family from Jena that owns a detached house built in the 1950s that is situated on the slopes of the Saale valley.

The original quote for the electrical installation work was for €3,500. The final bill, however, totalled €10,000 – not because the electrician failed to do the costing properly, but because he succeeded step by step in explaining to his customer the added value and long-term benefits of carrying out a comprehensive electrical modernization programme.

This article demonstrates that the big challenge facing electricians today is convincing their customers that, when comparing quotes, the bottom line is not enough – they have to ensure they are comparing like with like:

Several beta-tests on pilot sites are planned by 2009 to test the HOMES System. Tests will include contributions from the various partners. We are expecting the first results, namely controller improvements and new controller functions, to be in even before the programme ends; in other words within two years.

Warning services based on standard consumption profiles can be foreseen in housing. For example, a regular call for 300 W of power in the middle of the night can be identified as abnormal. This may indicate that equipment has been needlessly left on. Even more precise management may soon be possible, like detecting a critical drop in the efficiency of a freezer or checking that it is completely defrosted. The HOMES project is thus going to lead to new services in general and even new individualized services. For example, monitoring the electric consumption profile of a flat occupied by an elderly person could indicate in the morning that he or she has gotten up, had breakfast, and is performing his or her normal daily routine.
But this can only be achieved by understanding the standard profile of the flat, the house or the office building. The switchboard and its components must be equipped to make the link between the control system and the actual power flows, enabling a far more accurate control of each circuit, or even each electric load.

 

HOMES is based on research into basic technologies. For example, we seek to make each sensor totally autonomous in energy use by incorporating its own energy generator. Very low consumption wireless functions are essential to achieving this. They must work without batteries or connection to the electricity grid.

 

As another example, ST Microelectronics works with silicon carbide to improve the energy balance of energy converters. What is at stake is nothing less than the promise of high energy efficiency for all equipment incorporating energy conversion.

 

HOMES furthermore means breakthroughs in building system architectures. Remember that one of the goals is to deal with the entire building rather than a single function. Each sub-system must therefore be able to use the sensor information yet remain capable of stand-alone operation or operation within a system. With the correct control architecture, information can be merged at system level before being redirected to each sub-system in the building. This will involve the use of algorithms and the merging of data so that the system remains coherent. To achieve the lowest possible energy consumption for a building, the buildings’ subsystems must be able to take into account the interaction between various parameters and equipment. For example: in summer is it better to shade the windows and switch on low lighting, or to switch off the lamps and let sunlight in and with it the sun’s heat which may then necessitate cooling the air? The answer can only be found through the coherent integration of the parameters of human presence, temperature, humidity, interior air quality, etc., to produce adjustment instructions for each sub-system based on the laws of control.

 

Lastly, none of these developments should lead to great changes in the skills required for engineering and installation. The new solutions must therefore remain intelligible while adding value.

 

In practice, the initial investment frequently remains a hurdle, since the investor is rarely the operator. But the HOMES Project takes both viewpoints into account. The cost of a system will therefore be – at most – equivalent to that of the system it replaces. The financial benefits of operation and maintenance will quickly become apparent.

 

This is achieved by reducing component costs is the main challenge in standardizing the new solutions to be offered. HOMES is not just about fine tuning the best technological solution but about standardizing a mass construction market at no extra cost.

The HOMES project will be based on standard communication protocols to control a wide range of equipment and thus place the building in maximum energy efficiency mode. To achieve this, the various sub-systems have to share information from a number of common sensors rather than the current arrangement of a small number of equipment-specific sensors. This represents a huge change.

 

To reduce costs, HOMES will use wireless protocols like ZigBee and the standard open protocols Lon, Konnex, and Bacnet in wired networks. While we shall clearly not be developing new communication standards, we shall nevertheless improve the performance of existing protocols.

 

Input from the various project partners will enable the installer to configure the network under the same logic regardless of the type of equipment. For existing installations, communication gateways will provide the link with systems already installed. They will also provide the link between wired and wireless systems. The project thus lends itself to advances in the following areas:
-         Connection, especially linking sensors and actuators
-         Carrier currents, a major development area for very low-bandwidth control and even communication
Another important innovative aspect of HOMES lies in the services built up from these systems.

 

HOMES is a French acronym for ‘optimized housing and building for better control of energy and services.’ It allies some fifteen manufacturing partners and laboratories aiming at a final breakthrough in the field of home automation and building control. The target is a 20 per cent drop in electric energy consumption through the active management of electrical equipment. HOMES is another example of the contribution by the electricity sector to the better energy performance of buildings.

The following article is the result of a discussion with Claude Ricaud and provides an overview of Homes project. The article is published as an eBook so you can scroll the different pages using the titles bellow.

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A short biography of Claude Ricaud :

Claude Ricaud is currently Innovation Director of the Power Business Unit at Schneider Electric. He is a Telecommunications Engineer having graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure with a degree in mathematics in 1974. He started his career with France Telecom. In 1986 he joined the Matra Group (now EADS) where he worked in the Space division. He moved to Schneider Electric in 1998 as Scientific and Technical Director. He also chairs the Schneider Electric Ventures investment fund. Ricaud sits on the Board of Directors of the Supelec Foundation and the Scientific Boards of both Supelec, the leading French higher-education body for electrical engineering and computer science and INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. Ricaud has initiated and endorsed the Homes Project.

By Guy Kasier, E&D Systems

As national demographics see an ever increasing growth in the older age groups, so there is a significant demand for homes that cater to this market and to people who, for whatever reason, require some form of assisted living in their home to enable them to stay there rather than being cared for away from home – privately or by the state.

This article reports on a guided tour around service flats, reviewing the modern technologies used in them to improve comfort, welfare, safety and energy efficiency. These service flats had been built in Flanders (Belgium) by a company called Serviceflats Invest, a fixed capital investment company that was set up in 1995. This company has to date completed 46 projects comprising a total of 1,063 service flats specifically designed for the elderly. As a further indication of the demand levels, there are currently 4 projects on the go with 99 flats under construction and 13 projects with 331 flats in the design stage.

Download briefing paper

Courtesy de - Der Elektro- und Gebäudetechniker hereby a series of pictures about electrical safety hazards observed in buildings. Some even include public places such as restaurants or railway stations.

By Guy Kasier, E&D Systems

As the options grow for homes to become increasingly automated, throughout them the innovative use of traditional electrical installations is ever more apparent. All too frequently however, such innovations are restricted to appliances and equipment that are mainly suited for larger, luxury dwellings, with many of the manufacturers of these products only targetting this quite narrow top-end of the market.

Many, but not all manufacturers, with exceptions such as Eaton Holec (a Dutch / American company) that complements this existing home automation market by addressing and supplying solutions for the care sector. Eaton Holec’s Xanura system provides specific home automation facilities that enable the elderly to live at home for longer. This system can be used as easily in newly constructed homes as in existing ones, which is clearly very advantageous; it also makes use of the existing 230V cabling for its control signals.

Download review article

The fifth weekly session at the Leonardo ENERGY 3D Forum takes place this Friday October 26, from 14h00 - 15h00 Europe Daylight Time, where you can meet with the Leonardo ENERGY team and other users of the Leonardo initiative inside the 3D forum.

During the session, you can power-chat (chat in parallel with multiple visitors), talk by VoIP, exchange business cards or browse the pavillons of the 3D world, which is updated weekly. The pavillions comprise virtual stands where you have access to information and 3D models of a number of appliances.

You are also invited to listen to past recorded presentations in the archive room.

For this Friday, following side presentations are scheduled during the session:

The social session will be followed by a webinar in the Energy Efficiency Pavillon by Stefan Fassbinder entitled Shouldn't die casting motor rotors also be possible with copper?. It should start around 15h00, European Daylight Time.

If you have not already done so, download & install the 3D World and register for the 3D Forum.

We hope to see you there regularly as our virtual guest in our weekly sessions every Friday, but you are invited to visit and investigate the Leonardo ENERGY 3D Forum at any time.

 

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The Leonardo ENERGY team is a group of individuals dedicated to sustainable energy.

The Leonardo ENERGY 3D Forum is a highly innovative virtual environment for meeting & interacting with peers.

From this Friday September 28 onwards, from 14h00 - 15h00 Europe Daylight Time, you can meet weekly with the Leonardo ENERGY team and other users of the Leonardo initiative inside the 3D forum. We will animate the forum with short presentations, you can power-chat (or talk by VoIP) with us or others, exchange business cards, or browse the pavillons of the 3D world.

We will repeat this event weekly, on Fridays, while adding more content. Mark some of the future dates on October 5, 12, 19 and 26.

On selected Fridays, the social session at 14h00 will be followed by a webinar at 15h00. We already have 2 speakers lined up:

• On October 5, Angelo Baggini will explain resilient wiring architectures
• On October 26, Stefan Fassbinder will give the latest insights into copper motor rotor technology

If you have not already done so, download the 3D World, install it on your PC and register for the 3D Forum. We hope to see you there regularly as our virtual guest.

 

Why is Leonardo ENERGY concerned with electrical safety?

Well, as a team with a vision for sustainable energy, we're not only concerned with efficiency and environmental performance. Safety and comfort of users are also important. They represent part of the social dimension of sustainability.

The Electrical Safety Network is a user group collecting and distributing information related to the safe use of electricity world-wide. The group covers regulation, user education, solutions to imporve safety, inspection, fire & incident statistics, and much more.

To join the group, 4 easy steps:

1. Register for a diigo account (free of charge)
   
2. Join the Electrical Safety Network from its home page
3. Subscribe to dialy or weekly alerts at the home page (after joining)
   
4. Contribute & participate

To learn how to operate this environment, join our Webex session on the social web next week.