Click here to see which high-tech features could help the elderly and infirm live independently for longer

We are living longer, but can we do so without becoming a burden to our children? As Britain’s population increasingly becomes an aged one – those in the first wave of the baby-boomer generation turn 65 in four years’ time – health and community-care services will be stretched to the limit. But technology is already being harnessed to help elderly people – even those with Alzheimer’s disease – live independently for longer.

The term smart technology – computer-operated networks of sensors that make things happen without human intervention – conjures up a vision of a James Bond lifestyle, a world in which the house turns on the sauna as its master rolls up in his Porsche. Such gadgetry is increasingly common in upmarket homes, but smart technology has many other applications, as a one-bedroom flat in a residential care complex in Bristol demonstrates.

Aside from some strange black pads beneath the bed legs, there is nothing in the property to indicate that it is a den of high-tech wizardry. Yet each room is equipped with sensors that “talk” to devices such as the cooker, the taps and the lights, making them respond to the behaviour of the occupant. Leave a pan on the stove, or forget you have left the bath running, and the technology will prevent a disaster.

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The flat, a collaboration between the care-home provider Housing 21 and Bath Institute of Medical Engineering (BIME), with support from Bristol city council, is to be a temporary home for dementia sufferers. It is hoped that the first resident will move in as early as next month. They will live there for up to three months, the aim being to demonstrate how smart technology can help them live safely by themselves. When the occupant moves out, some of the devices that have assisted them can be installed in their own homes.

“We tend to picture the disease in its late stages and think there’s nothing you can do,” says David Self, dementia-services adviser at Housing 21. “But the people now being diagnosed with early-onset dementia are challenging our perceptions. They are saying, ‘We want to use everything that’s out there to stay independent – if it’s smart technology, that’s what we want.’ We are working with the local mental-health trust to see if there is potential to make our Bristol project a mainstream service.”

For more than a decade, the institute and Housing 21 have been exploring how smart technology can assist dementia sufferers. Initially, they wired a flat in a Gloucester care home, showcasing an earlier generation of sensors, developed mostly by BIME. “The aim from the start was to enable people to stay at home, because most of the evidence shows that’s where they are happiest,” says Professor Roger Orpwood, director of the institute, which is part of Bath University.

In many high-end homes with smart technology, the focus is on the gadgets themselves. The devices developed by the institute, however, are based on acute observation of how people with dementia respond to their environment. A Housing 21 home in Deptford, south London, equipped with sensors, gave Orpwood and his team valuable insight into the behaviour of those with the disease, thanks to one elderly sufferer who spent the last year of his life there.

Soon after he moved in, for example, sensor data revealed that he was up half the night, and getting little sleep – something his carers were unaware of. Orpwood’s team explored ways to coax him back to bed: prerecorded voice prompts proved successful, and, as a result, have been installed in the Bristol flat. If a resident is about to wander outside at 3am, a sensor will trigger a voice prompt explaining that it is nighttime, and that they should return to bed.

The team discovered that disembodied prompts work if the voice used belongs to somebody the occupant trusts: at the Deptford flat, the team used messages recorded by the man’s daughter. Some of the other devices available at the Bristol property include an automatic pill dispenser that beeps when it is time to take a tablet, and a night-and-day calendar that helps people with faulty memories keep track of time.

The project is not the only one in the country to explore ways in which high-tech gadgetry can benefit the aged and ill. Last year, the government allocated £80m to help fund local authorities investigating how sensors could assist the elderly. The Bristol project is a private pilot scheme, though, and its emphasis differs from many of the others. It aims to help people learn to trust technology, rather than focusing on “telecare”, where behaviour is monitored and a carer called in if something goes wrong.

“Our approach is to configure the house so the systems built into it provide the support directly,” Orpwood says, stressing that using technology as a replacement for carers won’t work. “It’s much more empowering. Nobody need know if someone leaves the cooker on, because the house can resolve that.”

Widespread construction of fully equipped smart homes is at least five years away. Yet much of the technology such homes would require is already a routine component of state-of-the-art building projects. It will be used, for example, in Heathrow’s Terminal 5, which is due for completion next year.

So, how easy is it to transform your house – or that of your parents – into a smart home? “There’s a lot of smart technology about, though much of it is unproven,” says Gareth Rowlands, a UK manager at Coventry-based ABB, whose systems are being used at Heathrow. “A basic system would cost from £7,000 to £10,000, but it’s all bespoke, so it depends on what you put in there.”

For someone with dementia, a basic smart-home configuration would include systems to control a cooker and taps, and presence detectors, to trigger lights. It could also include a passive infrared facility, which can sense someone getting out of bed in the night and light a path to the bathroom – that’s what the pads in the Bristol flat do. There might be a webcam, too, so family members can keep an eye on elderly relatives via a laptop. Sensors can also raise and lower work surfaces, and open and shut doors automatically, which would help arthritis sufferers.

Rowlands is convinced that smart technology could be used now to help the elderly and infirm stay independent for longer – if only more people knew of its existence.

“It requires people to demand it, architects to be aware of it and builders to see that if they install it, they’re adding value,” he says. “There needs to be both push and pull – but it will happen.”

Bath Institute of Medical Engineering; www.bime.org.uk. ABB; 024 7636 8500, www.abb.com/KNX. Housing 21; www.housing21.co.uk

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