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Shinil Suh 1 and Byung-Seo Kim 2 and Jae Hee Chung 3
Academic Editor:Jianhua He
1, Graduate School of Smart City Science Management, Hongik University, Sejong 30016, Republic of Korea
2, Department of Computer and Info. Commun. Eng., Hongik University, Sejong 30016, Republic of Korea
3, Department of Architecture, Hongik University, Sejong 30016, Republic of Korea
Received 19 July 2015; Accepted 6 September 2015; 30 September 2015
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
As information technologies (ITs) have rapidly been updated and evolved, things and environments around our societies have also been rapidly changed. In particular, emerging smart phones and sensor technologies have made individual's life style smarter, more convenient, and more efficient. By recognizing environment changes and human's behaviors, wireless sensor networks are able to reduce upcoming hazards and improve efficiencies in daily life. Such changes are also coming to our living environment represented by smart home. Recently, many houses, called "smart home," are equipped with lots of sensors and networks to provide some automatic or prediction services. However, even though it is certain that smart home makes our lives easier, people do not benefit from smart home that much. Particularly, the elderly people has difficulties in using such smart functions because the level of adaptation of the old people to the new environment and era is insufficient.
UN classifies three societies depending on the proportion of the elderly in the population (more than 65 years old) takes in a society: aging, aged, and super aged societies. According to the classification defined by UN, aging society refers to a society of less than 7% to 14% population ratio for the elderly people who aged 65 and more in total population. Society of 14% to 20% elderly people ratio would be referred as an aged society, and society of more than 20% of elderly people ratio would be a super aged society. As shown in Figure 1 [1], many countries rapidly move forward to the aged society. Population of aged people is increasing in nearly all regions. Even more, some of few countries are heading to super aged society...