The smart condo: visualizing independent living environments in a virtual world

Providing affordable, high-quality healthcare to the elderly while enabling them to live independently longer is of critical importance. In our Smart Condo project, we have deployed a wireless sensor network in an 850-square-foot condominium for assisted living. The sensor network records a variety of events and environmental parameters and feeds the related data into our web-based system. This system is responsible for inferring higher-order information about the activities of the condo's occupant and visualizing the collected information in both a 2D Geographic Information System (GIS) and a 3D virtual world. The architecture is flexible in terms of supported sensor types, analyses, and visualizations through which it communicates this information to its users, including the condo's occupant, their family, and their healthcare providers.