STACK #209 Mar 2022

LIFE TECH FEATURE

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THE SMART HOME

FEATURE

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ASSISTED LIVING LIFESAVERS As stressed health care systems face limited resources and workforce shortages to address the complex needs of our aged and differently abled populations, innovative approaches utilising smart home tech can help lighten your load considerably. Using either the devices hooked into your residential infrastructure, or wearable tech that captures data describing

activities of daily living and health related events, your smart home can greatly improve clinical outcomes and quality of life. THE HEAR AND NOW If you suffer from hearing loss, an idea up your alley might be to set your smart lights to flash when the video doorbell rings. Smart light options that can achieve this task are abundant. The two big players here are Philips Hue and LIFX, that not only offer a broad range of lighting for entertainment

A BRIGHTER WORLD The beauty of introducing smart

and practicality around the house, but also for handy programmable alerts. These quality lighting solutions are simple to install and even easier to connect, delivering 16 million different colour variations to suit any task, mood or your preferred visual cue. If your house is fitted with downlights, consider the LIFX 100mm Downlight. Also, the Philips Hue 90mm plug in and play downlight is the perfect solution, bringing smart lighting to the most popular downlight size in Australia.

lighting to your house is that it can be done progressively – all you need to do is choose the first room, and you’re off. This piecemeal approach is perfect for vision impaired folks who wish to target certain problem areas of their abode before others. Got a ludicrously hard to find light switch located on the wrong side of a glass coffee table? A motion sensor keyed to a smart light could solve that. Likewise, barking “coming up” or “headed down” to a voice assistant can help trigger a terracing effect of either stairway lights or proximity triggered audible notifications that help you gauge where these accident hazards start and end. SMOKE ON THE WI-FI The hearing impaired can take advantage of some clever smart home ideas as well. If a fire ever breaks out for whatever reason, you can't always

going on – and better enable rescue crews to locate your house – by having your smart garden lights go full disco mode as well. INCOMING HAIL, CAPTAIN Obviously, the same illumination logic can be applied to a range of other, less life and death

scenarios. You could set up a smart home scene for your beloved oldies to make their lights turn green whenever a known contact calls on their mobile. If it's not on the list (read: telemarketer) the call receives no such fanfare and we can avoid a needless rousing from an armchair and/ or bank transaction. To take this concept a step further into a routine, you could time schedule a light to turn red

assume that you're going to be in close enough proximity to catch a whiff of disaster coming. One solution would be to rig up your smart lights to interact with a 3-in-1 device that's tracking real-time CO2 concentration, humidity and

temperature. If it detects anything amiss, have the lights in your home do the illumination equivalent of a klaxxon – bright, pulsing red seems to be in chromatic fashion for this (this is based off years of watching sci-fi media where starship bridge crews are alerted to fire/Klingons). Heck, you could even alert the outside world as to what's

at predetermined times to indicate when it's time to take medication. In addition to that, your medicine cabinet could have a smart switch that resets the light for next time when the door is opened and closed.

36 MARCH 2022

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