Designing smart living for ageing Alice – and the persons next door

This article presents the co-design and development process for a home control system in the context of a healthcare ecology for older people accessing care home services. The contribution of this article is threefold: (1) it presents a design-oriented, user-centred approach for studying intelligent environments (IE); (2) it describes an ontology-based architecture that provides the foundation for the system, and (3) it introduces a proof-of-concept tool for creating and customizing IE services. The article dedicates the system to ‘Alice’, a central persona created for the initial research scenarios, representing a new arrival at a residential care home. This article illustrates the multifaceted design process and considers the challenges of linking Alice's ‘intelligent apartment’ to all the other apartments next to, and beyond, hers.