POSTECH's U-Health Smart Home For Elderly Monitoring and Support

With the increase of the aging society worldwide, hospitals, medical practitioners and health insurers are now increasingly seeking ways to reduce the cost of healthcare while maitaining its quality. One solution subject to attention from gouvernement and healthcare providers is the U-Health Smart Home that aims to provide non-intrusive and non-invasive monitoring and assistance to the elderly directly in their own home. At POSTECH, the U-Health Smart Home project is focused on building a smart home along with an autonomic system to monitor the home as well as the inhabitants to provide intelligent support and assistance in any situation at anytime. This paper presents our initial results from this project. The first contribution is a general framework for the U-Health smart home and the second one is an initial semantic model that can be used in the autonomic system to provide autonomic support to the elderly.