Title: Sensors in Smart Homes for independent living of elderly people

Abstract: In the UK alone approximately about 3.64 million people aged 65 or above live on their own, and this number is rising. This increases concern of the safety and wellbeing of an ageing population, as growing old often results in reduced capabilities for individuals to perform activities of daily living (ADL), which will soon have a compounded effect on wider societal health care and the economy. Recent technological advances allow logging, monitoring and tracking behaviour can be put to the service of reducing this burden, allowing elderly people to remain in their own homes safely and independently. In this talk, I will describe my MSc dissertation work on a system designed for recording ADL, monitoring, classifying, predicting and alerting concerned people if anything out of regular pattern or life threatening happening occurs using unobtrusive sensors so that their quality of life is not impaired. This development has highlighted a number of areas for extension and improvement which can be further explored in the context of my doctoral research, which I will also outline within this talk.

This dissertation work was completed at the University of Southampton in September 2017 under the supervision of Neil White and Adriana Wilde.