THE ROLE OF HYBRID POWER SYSTEMS TO CREATE SELF-SUSTAINING SMART HOMES FOR THE ELDERLY AND DISABLED

With the increase in the number of the elderly and due to the disabled’ demand for independent living, there is significant interest in smart home technologies which can assist the elderly and disabled to continue living at home with independence and safety. The feasibility and effectiveness of smart home technologies for promoting independence, health, and quality of life have been proved in the literature.  In recent years, there is increasing interest from care providers to provide caregiving services for the elderly and disabled in their home environments instead of caring them in assisted-living centres due to a number of reasons including costs. Since caregiving services are provided at specific times, a few times a day or week, smart home technologies can help care providers deploy services which trigger alerts when urgent situations occur. However, due to the cost of caregiving services, maintenance costs of smart home systems, and increasing electric energy consumption, generating electricity from renewable energy sources can play an important role for this objective. In this study, we present an environmentally friendly hybrid power system which automatically chooses its energy source(s) without any user input and give the results of simulation study performed using Homer software. The simulation study proves that the proposed hybrid power system can easily generate electricity required by a smart home.