Delivering home healthcare through a Cloud-based Smart Home Environment (CoSHE)

The dramatic increase of senior population worldwide is challenging the existing healthcare and support systems. Recently, smart home environments are utilized for ubiquitous health monitoring, allowing patients to stay at the comfort of their homes. In this paper we presented a Cloud-Based Smart Home Environment (CoSHE) for home healthcare. CoSHE collects physiological, motion and audio signals through non-invasive wearable sensors and provides contextual information in terms of the resident's daily activity and location in the home. This enables healthcare professionals to study daily activities, behavioral changes and monitor rehabilitation and recovery processes. A smart home environment is set up with environmental sensors to provide contextual information. The sensor data are processed in a smart home gateway and sent to a private cloud, which provides real time data access for remote caregivers. Our case study shows that we can successfully integrate contextual information to health data and this comprehensive information can help better understand caretaker's health status.