The smart home is pointless without the people that live in it and use it. They are its reason to exist and delivering a great user experience for them should be its primary goal. This includes all family members and also guests and visitors.
The only way to achieve this is by using models for the people that occupy and visit the smart home. All the key family members must be modelled in order for the contextual smart home to provide any kind of personalised user experience.
It is not always possible to to identify everyone individually, so the smart home must model the concept of 'unknown' people. Unknown people are important as they can also trigger sensors and provide occupancy information to the smart home, changing the context in which it is making decisions.
People requiring access to the smart home or its services and features are also significant and must be modelled, in order to provide the best possible user experience and to also enable access control and permissions to be enforced. In an assisted living environment, this includes the cared for and carer(s).
In order to make it simpler to configure who can do what, each person can be also be assigned to one or more roles. A role is essentially a group or collection of people. Each role can then also be used to simplify the setting of permissions.
A simple example we use in our own home is a role/group called 'Adults'. Only adults are allowed to turn the house alarm on and off, so in all the user interfaces, only adults will see (if the current user interface involves some kind of display) the controls to enable this and those trying to control the alarm via our AI interface will be informed they don't have permission to do so.
We have designed our Home Control System specifically with people, roles and their associated restrictions in mind, to make it really easy to configure and control what each person can do. You really don't want guests to be able to do things like enabling/disabling your security alarm or changing heating controls throughout your house.
A large amount of research has also gone in to working out what the default permissions are for each type of object should be, so that you don't need to configure everything with a new installation. Out of the box it will just work as most people expect.
People being cared for with dementia or other conditions not only need to have limited functionality but they also need to have only the required functionality exposed to them, to avoid confusion and frustration. User interfaces must adapt to each user and ensure the user experience is as simple and intuitive as possible.
Any restrictions associated with roles must apply to all of the smart homes user interfaces. There is no point in restricting what can be done on a physical device like a thermostat, if the person can simple bypass any restrictions by using voice control or some other interface.
