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Browsing Doctoral by Author "Okoroafor, Godfrey Nwaji"

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    Design and modelling of smart home technologies for the aged persons
    (Federal University of Technology, Owerri, 2021-07) Okoroafor, Godfrey Nwaji
    Smart home technology for the aged persons here is a wireless sensor-based home system that provide the aged persons a safe, sound and secure home environment, while enabling them to live independently in their own homes as long as possible. The aged persons here are that population within the ages of 65 years and above. Nowadays, the rapid increase in the number of aged persons, including those with disabilities, the decrease in the number of family care-givers as a result of youths` migration to cities in search of white-collar jobs, and inability of government to provide adequate infrastructural needs to these aged persons has resulted in a miss-match on the caring facilities in Nigeria. These have contributed to the problem of these aged persons, since neither families nor government are able to meet their needs, especially in Africa due to high level of mass poverty, illiteracy and corruption in governance. Therefore, the task of this proposed system here is to design and model a voice activated home control system that will utilize the natural voice of the aged home occupants, to provide a more convenient, easier to install and use, user friendly home technologies for the aged persons. This will enable them maneuver assistive wheelchair, and manage home appliances through voice commands. This assistive wheelchair developed is embedded with collision detection and avoidance. The tools used to realize this proposed system are; The Personal Computer (PC), HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, and Voice Recognition (VR) module in a PC used for voice processing and recognition, Microphone for voice signal acquisition, C-language with the help of C# for coding. Bluetooth and Radio Frequency (RF) transceivers wirelessly link the input module to the controller module (microcontroller) which selects the appliances/assistive device to be controlled according to the input voice command. Proteus Virtual System Modelling (VSM) was used for developing smart home technology system schematic model and carried out the animated simulation to validate the system`s performance within the home. The designed system was tested on Dead Home (a home with closed curtains, carpet, an air-conditioner, and other leaving home appliances switched off) and Live Home (a home with opened curtains, carpet, an air-conditioner, television, and other leaving home appliances, switched on, and with background music or noise from a stereo people) conditions, and the effective result was 92.93% for dead home and 75.85% for live home respectively. This showed that the realized system controlled the devices with voice, though, the level of this system response is higher in dead home than in a live home, hence, the level of the system performance is lower in a noisy environment.