Smart home tech image

Sarita Wilkinson, PDD Insights Editor imageSarita Wilkinson, PDD Insights Editor, delves into how and why smart home technology needs to adapt to the shift in user behaviour and why interoperability will be a key player in achieving this.


Assistive technology has the potential to help people streamline many aspects of their lives. Smart tech is enabling this shift, with smart speakers, lightbulbs, and doorbells just some of the products reaching almost every corner of our homes, constantly monitoring and pulling data from people and their environments.

While the current focus of smart tech in the home is largely on resource management, cost saving, and entertainment, the ubiquity of smart home tech poses further opportunities in supporting care for patients at home, both by enabling independence and assisting with adherence to treatment regimes in a non-intrusive way.

Demand for homecare technologies is seeing rapid growth as healthcare services remain under immense pressure from the continued rise in the ageing population and the health challenges that naturally follow this.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the number of people aged 80 years or older is expected to triple between 2020 and 2050 to reach 426 million globally. Faced with these challenges, the need to look beyond existing healthcare systems is required, putting a spotlight on smart home tech and its potential to provide accessible and affordable support that benefits both patients at home and healthcare providers.

So, what role could smart home tech play in transforming the care-at-home landscape?

Environmental monitoring

One of the most immediate opportunities lies within the monitoring of a patient’s home environment to detect potential dangers that could have a negative impact on health, such as air quality, ambient temperature, damp and mould, and natural light. Gathering such data can enable healthcare professionals (HCPs) to understand environmental factors that may exacerbate a patient’s condition, allowing them to adjust medication or bring in social care services to provide additional support.

From a patient’s perspective, providing insight into wider factors that can affect health could enable better self-management of a condition, such as allergies and respiratory conditions including asthma and COPD, allowing patients to take action before their situation worsens to the point where additional medical intervention is needed.

Activity monitoring

Motion sensors, cameras, and sound sensors commonly found in a lot of smart home tech could play a vital role in assisting HCPs and the families of patients with conditions such as Alzheimer’s. Unobtrusive monitoring of a patient’s movement in the home can help to uncover key behavioural patterns, using learning-AI to detect and report any behaviour that is out of character for an individual, risk of danger, or an emergency (for example: fall detection).

Combined with wearable technology, such systems have the potential to assist carers in monitoring and locating patients beyond their immediate home environment, widening the scope of social care whilst allowing patients to retain their all-important freedom of movement and independence.

Adherence support

Existing audio-visual technologies and sensors in smart home tech can be leveraged to support patient adherence to treatment regimens. What if a patient’s smart speaker could automatically remind them to take their medication or attend scheduled medical appointments? Could a smart TV visually guide patients through physio exercises, detecting when they are doing it wrong and suggest corrections? Imagine if a smart fridge could monitor and maintain the correct temperature of medication that requires refrigeration to prevent it from losing its effectiveness through incorrect storage.

While systems such as these can empower patients to take control of their health and support positive and lasting behaviour change through nudge theory, there is also an opportunity to provide vital behavioural insights to HCPs to identify any breakpoints in a patient’s treatment regime that can be followed up.

Potential barriers to adoption

As with any smart tech, there remains some significant barriers to application and uptake, and nowhere is this more vital to address than in the healthcare sector. Data security, accidental (or intentional) misuse, varying levels of tech literacy, and accessibility will continue to be some of the key concerns for patients and healthcare providers.

And while the healthcare industry is making progress towards interoperability through health information exchange networks and global standard for the exchange of electronic health data such as FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), challenges around interoperability between healthcare technologies and consumer smart home tech will need to be fully addressed before we can truly realise the potential of the smart home within the care-at-home landscape.

Looking ahead

Looking beyond the more immediate opportunities and limitations, we should continue to explore how emerging AI-powered healthcare technologies can be combined with existing and future smart home tech to form an ecosystem of care-at-home products that leverage familiar interfaces and interactions of the smart home experience, and, in doing so, provide a greater level of autonomy, independence, and sense of control to patients.

While seeking to improve health outcomes and create better care-at-home experiences; we should not overlook the benefits that such future eco-systems could also have to healthcare providers. Shifting some of the physical, environmental, and social health monitoring to patients and their surrounding tech could free up time of health and social care professionals to focus on other vital aspects of healthcare delivery.

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