Software engineering for health education and care delivery systems: The Smart Condo project

Providing affordable, high-quality healthcare to the elderly while enabling them to live independently longer is of critical importance, as this is an increasing and expensive demographic to treat. Sensor-network technologies are essential to developing assisted living environments. In our Smart Condo project, we have deployed a sensor network with a variety of sensor types in an 850 square-foot condominium. The sensor network records a variety of events and environmental parameters and feeds the related data into our Web-based system. This system is responsible for inferring higher-order information about the activities of the condo´s occupant and supporting the visualization of the collected information in a 2D Geographic Information System (GIS) and a 3D virtual world, namely Second Life (SL).