Experimental Design of Interoperable Smart Lighting for Elderly Care

Smart Home attains an active role in elderly care. Vision impairments caused by aging makes elders more dependent and affects the circadian rhythm or body clock. Some vision impairments can be improved by providing additional lighting. Smart lighting is the leading solution in providing adequate quality of lighting which helps elders to perform their daily activities independently. Various smart lighting solutions for elderly care are proposed in past and failed to consider about the energy loss due to over lighting. Additionally, the solutions are more independent in nature and not integrable to existing smart home solutions. To provide a solution to these ongoing challenges, an experimental design has been proposed to manage the adequate quality lighting for elderly people by controlling the illuminance and color temperature of the light with a feedback mechanism. Also, this experiment has integrated into a popular smart home platform. The proposed design keeps monitoring the ambient lighting and maintains the room’s illumination as required for elderly individuals. The functional behaviors of the experimental design are evaluated using a testbed. The result shows that the proposed design reduces the energy usage more than 50% along with providing adequate lighting for elderly individuals. In addition, this experimental design promises that the proposed method can be easily integrated into any existing smart home solutions with its native scripting framework.