A DIY approach to creating smart daily services for elders living alone

With the increasing number of the elderly people, considerable research efforts have focused on developing homecare services. Many of these services are able to provide good cares, but most of them need professionals to configure the service environments. This paper presents a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach to creating smart daily services for the elders living alone. Under this approach, no specific hardware is required and the user can create a new service/application simply by performing three simple operations: (1) attaching sensor(s) to object(s), (2) taking a photo of the sensor(s) along with the object by a mobile phone's camera, and (3) setting up the service through a graphical user interface. Compared with prior studies, our work enhances the relation between objects and sensors from one-to-one to one-to-many and resolves the device access conflict among services by introducing a priority scheme. An easy-to-use graphical user interface is developed for the user to quickly set up applications/services. We also implement a prototype of the proposed approach whose practicability is demonstrated by a simple application commonly used for the elderly people.