Abstract

Smart living environments are beginning to come of age. Smart environments technology may be embedded in the form of sensors to monitor the behavior of the inhabitant and through actuators the environment itself may be adapted to assist. Processing of the information collected within the home provides the ability, for instance, for care of the elderly through remote care assessment and management. As we move to an age of Smart Homes the more reliant an individual, for instance the elderly and ill, become on such environments the more reliable the system must be. They must operate correctly 24/7. The Autonomic Computing paradigm with its vision of creating self-managing (self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting) systems to ensure as components fail the system itself continues to operate, may provide this 24/7 reliability.