Remote Care and Collaboration for Empty Nest Family: Smart Home, Digital Twin and Mixed Reality

Abstract

With the acceleration of aging and the rapid upgrading of smart home devices, the solitary elderly of empty nest inevitably face the whirlpool of smart equipment. Lack of escort and assistance from their younger generations and third-party service, the senior's sense of loneliness and loss of control over smart home has become increasingly prominent. The authors of this article established a remote collaboration system for smart home (RCSSH) based on digital twin (DT) and mixed reality (MR), which achieves the cooperation between remote users (family juniors) and home users (the seniors) to complete auxiliary tasks such as remote company, management of smart devices, etc. In addition to sharing immersive perspectives and collaborative elements, the system also collects home environment data via hardware of internet of things (IoT) and displays them in the DT space to enrich the collaboration experience. Using augmented reality (AR) and remote interaction beyond physical space, the system can reduce the learning burden of smart homes for the in-home seniors through the bilateral remote collaboration, and expand the means that remote family members accompany their seniors, that make up for the loss of self-value for the elderly.