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the person is. There is still a long way to go to ensure that this technology is safe, robust
and acceptable, but the road map exists and it is down to time to see if anyone follows it.
This chapter has provided a detailed description of smart house implementations in
the United Kingdom and followed this with a complementary discussion on the functions
that are available from a smart house system to highlight the possibilities. This has dem-
onstrated the potential benefits of using smart technology and hopefully indicated how
it can support the personalised care agenda, especially for those with complex needs. A
number of the papers already referred to have highlighted the lack of an evidence base and
some have hypothesised reasons for the lack of proliferation of systems. These include sci-
entific, political, cultural and practical issues. The authors have reported on the practical
issues, both in relation to methodologies for assessment and evaluation and the logisti-
cal challenges associated with implementing specialist systems (Linskell and Bouamrane,
2012). It is important to investigate these issues to understand how to recognise and avoid
the barriers and pitfalls to achieving progress.
This field has in general been technology driven, and a number of publications are now
heavily alluding to this as a potential source of some of the issues. Without investigating
and understanding these matters, naive assumptions that plug-and-play wireless systems
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and related technological developments will inherently address all past issues could lead
to significantly more lost time, wasted resources and importantly more loss of faith in the
potential of technology to significantly enhance assistive living options.

References

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15 https://www.agileageing.org/page/neighbourhoods-future/.