About this site

The website identifies the main motivation for the problem, design objectives, metrics, and constraints that define our design space. It is intended to be an overview for a general audience. For the Final Project Report and other more technical information, please see the Documentation Page.

What is our project?

SALE – Smart Assistive Living Environment

Lafayette College’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering requested the 2025 senior class to design and/or integrate user-friendly devices that create a cost-efficient smart living environment for people with disabilities or older adults.

With the growing need for independent living among people with disabilities and the elderly, smart homes offer a transformative solution through automation and remote control of daily household tasks. However, most existing systems lack inclusive designs that address the specific needs of users with impaired motor function. To bridge this gap, we developed a minimalist yet scalable smart home framework incorporating a custom adaptive remote control device that uses directional input to interact with various smart appliances. The system enables users to perform essential and semi-essential tasks such as lighting, entertainment, and door control, with minimal physical effort.

The smart home design may cater to four categories of population:

  1. Aging population: The older people who have limited physical strength and mobility, and have difficulties managing their daily tasks, like turning off appliances, managing medications, etc. They may manage the smart home through the SALE Android app.
  2. People with limited forelimb (hand) mobility: This includes individuals who have congenital conditions, injuries, or neurological disorders that limit the hand mobility and fine motor skills, like using fingers to use a touch screen interface. The adaptive device enables gross hand motions (like fist pounding) to control the smart home.
  3. People with no hand mobility and hind limb mobility: This includes people who are not able to use their hands due to paralysis, amputation, or serious neuromuscular diseases. The adaptive control device can use leg motions (kicks) to control the smart home.
  4. People with no limb mobility: This includes individuals who have lost or were born without both upper and lower limbs face significant challenges in interacting with their environment. For them, our smart home system can provide comprehensive limbs-free control through voice recognition.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Professor Yih Choung Yu, our capstone instructor, for his continuous support, insightful guidance, and encouragement throughout the development of our Smart Home System. We also thank Professor Wey for his assistance with electrical system design, Professor Priyank Kalgaonkar for his feedback during the embedded system design review, Adam Smith for his valuable input on PCB design and review, and Marv Snyder for his support with the mechanical placement of smart home components. We are also grateful to Professor Biernacki for her help with Android development, and to Professor Brown for his guidance on working with Bluetooth communication protocols. Finally, we extend our appreciation to our fellow senior design teams for their helpful suggestions and collaborative spirit, which contributed to the improvement of our smart home system.