ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces home automation and telecare, and presents the general challenges that they pose. Consumers have become increasingly knowledgeable about computer-based capabilities thanks to widespread use of personal computing, mobile phones, media players, and the like. The chapter describes related work in the areas of standards and interoperability, home system architectures and platforms, automated home management, and user interfaces for the home. It illustrates a typical approach to computer-based home support. The Homer project offers a generic solution for both home automation and telecare. The chapter details the philosophy and high-level architecture of the system, and reviews the types of components and how they are flexibly integrated into the system. The user-friendly interfaces at the top level aim to make it easy for non-technical users to manage their homes. Interface design techniques of relevance to home systems include programming by demonstration, tangible programming, and visual programming.
