HYDRA

The TSB has noted that telecare should be available anytime and anywhere. Yet devices for assisted living cease to function outside the home and devices installed in one location will not work if moved. Furthermore, not every home has access to the same communications channels (a telephone line for instance). But every home does have an electricity meter, and the forthcoming UK smart meter roll-out will provide universal network coverage, and project a local wireless network into the home.Our project seeks to exploit the smart meter network to deliver telecare services. One of our objectives is to develop and demonstrate an open, standards-based smart meter architecture capable of supporting end to end communications between a family of telecare devices and care-givers. We aim to ensure that devices that work in one home will also work in any home with a smart meter.But not every home will be fitted with a smart meter immediately, and the meter's wireless coverage will not extend far beyond the home. Thus we will develop a separate home hub device, using an alternative comms channel, that can be used in houses without smart meter coverage. We will develop telecare devices with two wireless interfaces: ZigBee for connection to the smart meter in the home and Bluetooth for connection to mobile phones when away from the home. Our objective is for devices to work with smart meters in any house, to move seamlessly between networks and for the user experience to be identical in each case.The TSB has noted interoperability as a problem. Thus we aim to exploit new standards to ensure that compliant telecare devices and application software from any manufacturer will interoperate. Where standards do not already exist we will propose new ones.