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Chapter 8 • Assisted Living 225

energy) being adopted in 2010. There are a number of home automation devices that are
Bluetooth enabled, such as locks, blinds and LED lighting, but what makes this technol-
ogy so important in the assisted living arena is its mass market penetration via comput-
ers and especially smartphones. A large-scale proliferation of Bluetooth-enabled sensors
and compatible apps in the health and well-being sphere can be seen. Bluetooth LE in
particular offers many possibilities in terms of wearable devices that can communicate
with smartphones. Most new smartphones running Android, iOS and Windows are now
offering Bluetooth LE as standard.

Thread

Thread was founded in July 2014 and is a new open wireless protocol for home automa-
tion. It was founded by a number of key players, including Google’s Nest Labs, Samsung
Electronics, ARM Holdings and Silicon Labs. Based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard it is an
IPv6-based mesh network that will allow a large number of low-power devices to connect
securely with each other within a network and directly with the internet. A number of open
source implementations of the protocol are currently available to developers.

Internet Protocol

Both for high-speed local connectivity over longer distances, and to facilitate remote
access and access to cloud services generally, networking protocols have to offer the
ability to communicate over IP. Some systems offer gateways for this and some offer it
natively, especially the newer wireless systems. Of particular interest in relation to this is
how all the services that can be accessed over IP can be brought together in an efficient
and meaningful way for the consumer in the domestic environment. It has long been
envisaged that the home would contain a hub that was the entry point and manager of
these services, and clearly standards are required if such hubs are going to operate easily
and reliably.

OSGi

Open Systems Gateway Initiative (OSGi) is a Java-based platform for developing and
deploying modular software programs and libraries. The vision was the creation of a stan-
dardised middleware for smart devices by providing a vendor-neutral application and
device layer application programming interface and functions. The OSGi Alliance was
founded in 1999 by, Ericsson, IBM, Motorola and Sun Microsystems, among others. It was
later incorporated as a nonprofit corporation called the Connected Alliance. A number of
gateways conforming to this standard have been developed.
With this brief overview of the technological landscape, the authors will summarise the
attempts that were made in the United Kingdom to harness these technologies to sup-
port assisted living. These will highlight both the underlying ethos and the practical issues,
which will both be discussed.