The University of Stirling is using its expertise in networking technologies to develop solutions for health and social care at home. The aim is to employ various forms of home automation to support everyday living.

A simple example of this would be creating a network whereby an elderly person watching television in their living room could use a special remote control to switch off lights and set appliances without having to physically get up and walk over to the device to do it.

The backbone of Stirling's research is based on OSGi or the Open Services Gateway Initiative. This is an industry standard for connecting devices within a network. It supports services that are being researched by the project collaborators. Stirling aims to develop software which can take advantage of this and make simple devices do extraordinary tasks within the home environment. To do this, Stirling is concentrating on four main technologies: OSGi, X10, UPnP and Jini.

To discover more about these technologies please use the menu on the sidebar to view simple tutorials on each topic, or click on the links above.

Alternatively you can click the continue arrow below to go straight to the first Home Care technology.