Patent attributes
An improved home automation system is provided to facilitate senior care, as well as to facilitate care for individuals suffering from Alzheimer's disease or other dementias. A home control unit is provided that is connected to, and interfaces with, a combination of health equipment, smart home appliances, a smart medicine cabinet, a smart pantry, wearable sensors, motion detectors, video cameras, microphones, video monitors, speakers, smart thermostat, lighting, floor sensors, bed sensors, smoke detectors, glass breakage detectors, door sensors, and other perimeter sensors. A distributed computational architecture is provided having a CPU associated with each video camera and an associated proximate microphone and speaker, wherein speech detection and processing, and video processing, is performed by each such CPU in conjunction with its associated video camera, microphone, and speaker. Remote backup for such distributed speech processing is selectively provided by a remote server based upon confidence scopes generated by each such CPU. The distributed computational architecture is also utilized for video processing to facilitate peer-to-peer video conferencing communication using industry standard formats and to reduce latency and response times that would otherwise be encountered using remote servers.
