Smart home technology has potential beyond the use of assistance devices. It can serve individual health and wellbeing, transforming the domestic environment into a site for preventative and maintenance care.
Smart home and at-home healthcare technology can support users in several ways. Through preventative or diagnostic care, it helps to keep track of micro-indicators that would maybe be otherwise overlooked. It can also empower individuals to have agency over their health outcomes, especially where inequality can manifest. And design-driven solutions adapt smart home technology to be more precise in addressing and improving individual health and wellbeing.
Towards preventative care
While wearable technology is able to regulate physiological indicators such as heart rate, exercise and sleep, the current mainstream offer is limited to these types of datapoints. Tracking a larger diversity of indicators can help individuals have a more holistic understanding of their overall health, acting as a guiding point to encourage them to seek additional care. This technology is being integrated into the home, allowing users to reap its benefits with little to no disruption in their normal at-home behaviour.
Cover and above: Aidee combines a physical device and smartphone interface, compatible with an at-home toilet, and monitors biochemical metrics like blood and urine. The companion device uses ambient lighting to communicate results to users and doubles as a discrete decorative object
Developments like EPFL+ECAL Lab’s Aidee facilitate complete monitoring based on biochemical measurements through bodily fluids like blood and urine. Based on research and technology matured by the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, Aidee has been made compatible with everyday toilets. A physical device and smartphone interface communicate data with users. It ‘opens major prospects for developing a better relationship with the parameters that promote our health and wellbeing,' a report from the design studio says. Appearing as a small lamp, the companion device uses ambient lighting to convey results and doubles as a discrete decorative object, maintaining privacy and lessening the stigma around this aspect of physical health.
Making use of AI, Nobi developed a light that can detect, prevent and predict falls in elderly people. It’s capable of monitoring vital signs and is part of a generation of smart home technology being used to support individual health and wellbeing.
The use of sensors and other measurables in the home will have implications for preventing and responding to health crises. Nobi has designed a series of smart lamps that can aid in detecting and responding to falls sustained by elderly people at home. They are discrete – think ceiling or table lamps – but utilize sensors and communication technology to monitor the wellbeing of the user. Equipped to sense a fall and contact first responders, they also track information like sleep cycles and will also be able to track coughing patterns. A smartphone app and dashboard give users and caregivers an overview of activity, generating a more precise overview of these datapoints to empower them to seek medical attention when necessary.
Agency over individual health
It is this sense of agency that gives users a firsthand role in monitoring their health. Having technology built into the home helps to give peace of mind, by tracking data before a health episode occurs. These products and devices transform the function of our homes, allowing occupants to not merely rely on their access to healthcare. While seeking medical attention is of the utmost importance, it is not always accessible or affordable, and, for some, has been historically untrustworthy.
Momma's Kit supports Black (soon-to-be) mothers who are disproportionately affected by maternal mortality. The at-home health kit is helping to transform the home into a site for individual healthcare.
For example, in the United States, maternal mortality rates for non-Hispanic Black women are disproportionately high compared to white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Per 100,000 births, there are 69.9 deaths on average, a difference of 2.6 times between the two groups. While the reasoning for such a disparity is complex, it boils down to inaccessibility to healthcare along with bias and discrimination built into the system. Leadoff Studio designed Momma’s Kit, a user-friendly home healthcare kit, for expecting and new mothers to monitor their vitals. Giving access to such kits, packaged in tall, lavender-coloured metal tins, could help detect 80 per cent of the most common conditions that contribute to maternal mortality for Black people.
A series of four healthcare devices were designed by Map Project Office and Modem to allow users to monitor basic healthcare metrics at home with the help of AI.
Similarly, Map Project Office and Modem's Smart Aid Kit enables patients to perform basic triage on themselves or others with the kit taking the role of a virtual practitioner. The kit, comprising four devices – a stethoscope, spirometer, ophthalmoscope and a skin analyser – uses AI to help users screen their health. Though the kit itself doesn’t have a spatial component, it requires one to manually measure the indicators, turning the home into a healthcare environment. The adoption of such technology could perhaps have implications on how the healthcare experience is designed, supporting overstrained healthcare systems and encouraging people to take action over their health.
Integration is key
While each of these solutions answers to a different aspect of individual health, it would be interesting to see how they could be integrated further into the home to help provide a more holistic and even less invasive overview of one’s wellbeing. If looking at how the smart home can perform a function beyond convenience, integration will be essential. Our recent Report Recap on the future of the smart home says: ‘In aligning their household devices harmoniously with the Internet of Things (IoT), [USERS] are looking for seamless and smooth configurations “with an element of freedom (without a subscription) in one place”’. For now, designers can consider how the spaces they design can support the current technology and be primed for adaptation so that the home isn’t merely a living space but one that nurtures our health and wellbeing.
