Education

Smart House

During the headstart course you will be given the opportunity to visit the smart house on campus, CUHTec has a 3-bedroom bungalow on the University of York campus which is furnished as a "living home" laboratory. This Responsive Home contains demonstrations of various technologies and equipment for recording and analysing user behaviour in a domestic setting.

User testing

The Responsive Home is used to test both assistive and wider consumer technologies in a domestic setting familiar to users. The house includes a fully equipped kitchen, a fully furnished living room and dining room, and a bathroom with basic provision for disabled access. We are able to observe and record how people behave when using selected technologies.

Smart Fridge

This fridge anticipates RFID tags being used to label individual packages so that it would be possible to look up sell-by dates etc. An animated avatar uses new natural language processing algorithms to advise the owner of the fridge on what to throw away, recipes and so on. This sort of advice system would be invaluable to people who have cognitive problems, or just anyone who wants to know what is in their fridge from a distance. The SmartFridge is one of the demonstrators being built as part of the UDA project. The SmartFridge was built jointly by Lexicle and The University of York. Find out more at the Lexicle SmartFridge page and the UDA project pages.

Smart Sink

A sink that can be raised and lowered for wheel chair users. This is the only example we have of electronic technology that aids people in their activities of daily living, as opposed to monitoring for emergencies as in the telecare system pictured below.