Projects for 2012

Global Smart Village - Smart Communities, Smart Cities and a Smarter Planet

Join us in our Global Smarter Village initiative, an open community to engage, share, contribute and develop smarter solutions for the planet.

Global Smarter Village

SSL makes smart homes, smart buildings and smart living a reality. We are driven to realise a world where connected technology works for humans in homes, shops, offices and other buildings.


As more devices in the home and the workplace have intelligent computing power, a truly connected world is possible. SSL solutions makes the connections, so that energy use can be monitored and automatically reduced; in-home health care support is delivered effectively and sensitively 24/7; and appliances run more effectively to increase lifespan and optimise efficiency

Our work with TAHI.

TAHI Project's to include DALLAS and the Internet of Things.

It is expected that the DALLAS project would aim to work in an interoperability ecosystem where there was re-use of resources and where for instance energy management systems could inform Assisted Living systems. DALLAS would be a holistic attempt to ensure that people, buildings, devices and systems interoperated and delivered “Buildings fit for people”. Thus, there is likely to be opportunities for organisations outside the direct health and wellbeing providers.

There are also “Internet of Things” aspects to the Assistive Living ecosystem where the systems included multi domain “things” Therefore sustainability, energy saving and safety were also important and it could be said that savings from energy efficiency could deliver benefits for people living in a better environment and at a lower cost (with additional funds available for Healthcare).

The POP Project

Projects for 2010 - 2011 Smart Village

Sensory Systems introduce Solutions for a Smart Village.

Smart Village - TSB part funded project. For more information visit www.smart-village.eu

The themes of universal services, prevention and early intervention, social capital and choice and control set out in the Putting People First concordat and in the government document ‘Valuing People Now’ that promotes rights, independence, choice and inclusion are achievable and sustainable only through whole system transformation. Assistive technology will make an important contribution to delivering this fundamental change. Where assistive technology is used as part of a support
package to delay or prevent the need for institutional care and to slow down an individual’s journey up the escalator of dependency.

Access to knowledge through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become a prerequisite for citizens of modern information based societies. Equality of access for all to the full benefits and opportunities afforded by ICT is considered essential.

It is recognised however that disabled people and other socially disadvantaged groups can experience significant barriers when using ICT.

Sensory Systems will seek to promote ICT “eInclusion” by raising awareness of the benefits of accessible design as well as sourcing, designing, producing and selling accessible products, services, information and knowledge.

Sensory Systems have a wide network of contacts within disability and technology fields and with the support of other organisations and its network we hope to form further strategic alliances with ICT eInclusion stakeholders.

Sensory Systems considers that a great deal of accessible design already exists or at least could exist with minimal additional awareness and effort. Where it does exist we will try to obtain distribution rights to sell or provide it. Where it does not we will endeavour to design, develop and produce accessible products and services either independently or in partnership with others. We will actively use the new British Standard, BSI 7000-6, on managing inclusive design to help us reach new markets while complying with recent legislation. 

European funded projects 2010

Technologies for Sensory monitoring and independent living.

ICT & Ageing – Users, Markets and Technologies a study funded by the European Commission.

There are a number of fields of ICT deployment where technologies and applications are relatively mature terms used in the ICT & Ageing project are.

* ‘Social alarm’ is the term used to describe a service (and associated equipment) that enables help to be called by an older person when needed. The service typically involves a special telephone or portable alarm device that can be used to make a call to an alarm centre in the event of a need arising (e.g. a fall). Social alarms have frequently been called ‘first generation telecare’. Often, but not always, more advanced telecare services are developed as add-ons to the basic social alarm services and are implemented over the social alarm infrastructure.

 
* The term ‘telecare’’ is used to describe a range of enhancements to the basic social alarm service concept. For our purposes, telecare is concerned with the provision of social care (i.e. non medical services) to the home. Typical examples include the provision of various sensors in the home (e.g. fall detectors, bed/chair occupancy sensors, smoke, gas and flood detectors, and so on) that alert social care services in the event of a problem arising in the home. In addition, videophone-based or other remote social care to the home can also be considered to be forms of telecare. Such applications have frequently been called ‘second generation telecare’, whereas the term ‘third generation telecare’ has been used to describe ICT-based solutions of more preventative nature such as extensive sensoring in the home for the purposes of ‘lifestyle monitoring’.

 
* The term ‘telehealth’ is used in this study to refer to the use of ICTs in the delivery of medically-oriented care services to older people in their homes. It can include a variety of somewhat different services or applications, including telemonitoring (e.g. blood pressure, blood glucose, ECG, etc.), teleconsultation (e.g. online, by videophone, by telephone) and telerehabilitation (e.g. by videophone), as well as self-care devices to be used by people in their own homes to help them monitor and manage their health themselves. They are often, but not always, developed and implemented independent of telecare solutions, in part because of the traditionally separate organisation of and demarcation lines between medical care and social care.

 * ‘Smart homes’   is the term now commonly used to describe a range of environmental control, home automation and home network systems that can help older people to remain living independently in their own homes. In addition to such ’systems’, there are also a variety of more standalone ICT-based assistive technologies that can help older people to remain independent, including computer-based or other electronic communication aids, object locators, reminder systems and so on.

The e-Home project carries out R&D activities for an assistive home system which can prolong the time of independent living for elderly people. It consists of an intelligent and adaptive network of wireless sensors for activity monitoring which is connected to a context-aware central embedded system. By learning and adapting to the behaviour patterns of the users it will detect abnormal or dangerous situations and emerging medical conditions.

CommonWell  is a project funded under the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme of the European Commission. The project aims to integrate and evaluate ICT-enabled health and social care services in order to improve the quality of life of older poeple and their families. The focus is on problem situations faced by many older people, particularly those which threaten their independence. It also examines the requirements of cost-effective and user friendly management of chronic conditions. The implemented and tested services are to be deployed at four locations in Europe. A total of 400 users are to receive services in pilot trials lasting over 12 months.

The Enable project.The project will develop a personal, user-centered enabling system, with services, for use by an elderly person in or out of the home, to mitigate the effects of any disability and to increase quality of life: independence, autonomy, mobility, communications, care and safety. The system will be based on a distributed open platform, enabling other services to be added by third parties, by "plugging" into defined interfaces. The platform includes a mobile phone, enabling the user to get out and about, for visiting, shopping, recreation, etc, whilst maintaining contact for help and services.

New Hearing Aid Technology In Europe Comes To The Home  Health Care, Technology European researchers have combined state-of-the-art technologies to help end the isolation suffered by the hearing impaired.

The number of people suffering from hearing impairment is increasing, and as the disability grows it spreads isolation in its wake.

Vision is the primary sensory system for navigating the real world, but sound is the mainstay of our social sphere. When people start to lose their hearing they slowly begin to withdraw from the world. Conversation becomes difficult and confusing, as sound begins to smudge in the auditory cortex, like ink blotting on a page. Worse, it is one of the few disabilities that the victims can conceal successfully, and they do.

Embarrassment typically causes people to delay seeking help, often for years. “The average person who begins to lose their hearing typically waits seven years before seeking help,” explains Jochen Meyer, coordinator of the Hearing at Home project, alias HaH. “We wanted to do something to help those people.

Your TV hearing aid ‘Doing something’ consisted of combining some state-of-the-art technologies into a single system that can be easily integrated into the average home, where people, including the hearing impaired, spend most of their discretionary time.

This approach not only tackles some of the real and possibly life-threatening in-home difficulties experienced by the hearing impaired, it also introduces them to assistive technologies in a controlled environment. “So our idea was to move the hearing aid closer to people’s every day life,” Meyer reveals. The HaH team hopes this will help overcome the typical resistance to technology like hearing aids; when users experience the power of a hearing aid they become much more open to it.

In the HaH system, the technology centred around the television, because it tends to be the most frequently used piece of technology in the house, and as the sound and vision centre of most homes, it lends itself to an assistive role.

Tuned to specific impairments The heart of the HaH platform is the Set-Top Box (STB), which links hardware around the house, routing the assistive technologies through the TV. These include acoustic technologies, home automation and phone integration.

The system is easy and fast to set up. “Typically, when you go to an acoustician for a hearing aid fitting, you go through a complex testing process to tune the hearing aid to your specific impairment,” Meyer explains. The acoustician is testing a wide range of frequencies to determine those that pose the greatest problem to the user.

Tuning then consists of boosting some frequencies, and suppressing others, to maximise sound clarity. “With our STB, the user can go through this test, by themselves, in 10 minutes,” explains Meyer.

When the user watches TV, the sound is adjusted on the fly to match their needs. The STB can also suppress background noises from the audio stream. “If you are watching a documentary about traffic, traffic noise could drown out the narrator. The HaH platform can suppress that traffic noise in real time,” says Meyer. If there is a phone call, an alert appears on the TV screen, and the conversation is routed to the handset via the STB, so the audio is optimised for the user.

It can also handle video calls via voice-over IP (VOIP). Similarly, there is an alert, and a CCTV picture, if a caller comes to the door. “That’s important, because you don’t want to miss any visitors, it just adds to the isolation,” emphasises Meyer.

The system also links to other parts of the house, such as the washing machine or microwave or the cooker. Any alarms, such as a fire alarm, appear instantly on the screen.

Talking heads Finally, the team also created an avatar, an animated talking head, which accurately lip-syncs with any audio coming from the television, so users can lip read if necessary. “This is processed locally, using the data coming from the audio signal to create the lip movements on the avatar.”

The project took a comprehensive approach to many of the problems faced by the hard-of-hearing, dramatically extending the state of the art in several domains. “Many of these technologies already existed, and we simply combined them into an integrated system that responds to real needs,” Meyer notes, “But many of them we extended, too.” For example, research on acoustic tuning for hearing aids is very basic, and HaH worked on this so that users can now perform the tuning automatically.

Excited end users. The technology has drawn intense interest from industry and academic peers, but the greatest eagerness encountered by the team comes from the end users. “We spent a lot of time looking at these technologies, at how they could work together to help the hearing impaired with real-world problems,” stresses Meyer. That careful groundwork paid off. “We have two demonstration sites, in Oldenburg, Germany, and Madrid, Spain, and the feedback we get from the hearing impaired is very encouraging,” Meyer explains. “They are very excited by the technology, and they really want to get it for themselves or loved ones.”

Industrial contacts, too, are interested, and talks are ongoing. “But I think we could see a commercial version of this platform available in the next two to three years.” In the meantime, the team is currently considering other areas where the technology could be applied and extended, and the partners are looking at new projects under the EU’s current Seventh Framework Programme for research. The HaH project received funding from the ICT strand of EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from Gov Monitor: http://www.thegovmonitor.com URL to article: http://www.thegovmonitor.com/world_news/europe/new-hearing-aid-technology-in-europe-comes-to-the-home-20127.html

UK Projects

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Today’s Internet of people is extending into an “Internet of things,” and soon there will be more than one trillion connected devices. By 2013, 1.2 billion connected consumer electronics devices are expected in the more than 800 million homes with broadband connections.

Compared with previous attempts to enable “smart buildings,” where the intelligence was based on centralized control through a home server or gateway, the intelligence in the new smarter buildings extends into the network, or more precisely the Internet cloud.

This new paradigm exposes opportunities for harnessing collective consumer knowledge and offering innovative services which build on the computational power and scalability of the cloud.

Data aggregated and stored within the cloud can provide dramatic new insights about consumer needs and behaviour. “Smarter Buildings and Smart Cities” are on the horizon.

The increasing ubiquity of Web-enabled home appliances and devices, coupled with widespread broadband communications, are finally enabling new “intelligent” products and services that reach far beyond traditional markets.

SSL’s smart solutions are built on three interlinking elements: Smart instrumentation Smart interconnectivity Smart shared spaces. Our solutions are delivered through innovative hardware – the SSL Bridge; combined with robust and scalable cloud-based software – the SSL Service Delivery Framework.

Clients can start with a small-scale pilot, building and testing solutions within the Service Delivery Framework, before seamlessely scaling to full-scale projects supporting millions of sites. The SSL Bridge communicates across the most commonly used protocols (i.e. ZigBee, ZWave, KNX, Modbus, Enocean, LON), acting as a universal translator to connect devices and buildings managment systems speaking different languages.

No two deployments are exactly the same. Neither are our solutions. Using tested, robust building blocks we tailor our solutions to meet clients’ requirements.

Solutions are built on common hardware platforms, allowing for rapid and scalable deployment. Bespoke designs are available for added impact.

Delivering a fully connected solution means communicating across all protocols. SSL works across protocols, using open standards where possible, focusing on delivering the vision.

Hardware, software, design and delivery – SSL solutions provide everything required to deliver smart, interconnected spaces in any building, at any scale.