4.1 Introduction

In the houses of today and tomorrow the presence of capillary distributed computer systems is going to be more and more intense. In recent years the number of commercial products for the intelligent house has grown considerably. The term domotics (from the Latin word domus, which means home , and informatics) groups all those solutions that aim at automating certain processes for everyday life in the house. These solutions address some important issues related to domestic life: security and safety (anti-intruder alarms, fire-watching systems, gas leak detection, remote video surveillance); access control (CCTV-based video control or video entry phone); appliance control (remote programming and monitoring, diagnostics, maintenance); energy control and saving, comfort (heating and air conditioning control, light control, UPS management); actuations and motorisations (shutters and frames' control, gate control).

A new emerging term in this field is homevolution ; that includes both the standard domotic solutions and the new advanced solutions exploiting information technology, such as

• telecommunication: telephony, wireless communication, radio communication;

• informatics and telematics: home computing, home-office, telework;

• commerce, banking, tourism, etc.: e-commerce, home banking, e-tourism, distance learning;

• information and entertainment: video-TV, DVD, digital TV, home theatre, video games;

• intelligent control: voice-activated commands, computer vision-based surveil-lance, biometric authentication;

• health and well-being: telemedicine, teleassistance, telediagnosis.

These last two classes of applications are of particular interest for the social benefits they can bring and will be the main topic of this chapter. In-house safety is a key problem because deaths or...