Smart homes 'read' dwellers' health

Dr Jim Briggs is one of a team of experts in the Faculty of Technology at the University of Portsmouth studying ways to capture more information about the minutiae of how we live to help build the brains of new, advanced sensors in ’smart’ homes.

The sensors will be able to ’read’ the health and wellbeing of those who live in a house and upload the information to a secure website for a relative or carer living remotely – even hundreds of miles away – to see.

Dr Briggs and his team have won £128,000 of the £4m given to their university under the government’s Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) for their effort.

Dr Briggs, who has 12 years’ experience in telemedicine, is working with Newbury-based Smart-home technology firm PassivSystems to take some of the ideas to market.

The interdepartmental team, including Dr Misha Filip, Dr Djamel Azzi and Dr Rinat Khusainov, will test sensors in a ‘living laboratory’ to gather information about what is normal in different environments. The testing and analytics to make a workable, useful ’smart’ home have to be rigorous to ensure that the sensors can recognise the difference between someone falling over and someone having a nap, for example.