Smart house unveiled

This Smart House gadget can help to locate lost items

By BBC Health Correspondent Daniel Sandford

Medical engineers have been showing off their "Smart House" - the first home specially adapted for the needs of people, many of them elderly, who are becoming forgetful or developing dementia.

It switches off the cooker when the pan boils dry, turns off the bath when you leave it running and even locates your purse when you cannot find it.

The project is a collaboration between the charity Dementia Voice, the housing association Housing 21 and the Bath Institute of Medical Engineering.

Professor Jane Gilliard of Dementia Voice first came up with the idea after she saw a house adapted for people with disabilities.

Prof Jane Gilliard: Helping people live independently

She thought that if people with physical difficulties can have their houses altered to help them live at home, why not people who are developing dementia?

"The design philosophy is to emulate what a good live-in carer would do", she says.

"We're not wanting the house to take control of people's lives but to enable them to live safer and more securely in their own homes for longer."

Some of the features of the house, which is in Gloucester, are very simple. The light switches have large coloured strips round them to make them highly visible, and the kitchen cupboards have no doors in case you forget where things are kept.

Some older people who are developing dementia forget how modern devices work. Sometimes they melt their electric plastic kettle because they put it on the hob. The Smart House has an old-fashioned metal kettle.

But it is the electronic wizardry that makes the Smart House unique.

A sensor stops the bath from overflowing

There's a sensor in the bath that knows when it is ready. It triggers a voice to warn the resident that they have left the bath running.

If the resident ignores it the bath turns itself off automatically. The temperature of the water is also carefully controlled.

The bed has a sensor which knows when you get up in the middle of the night. It turns the bedroom light on automatically and then turns on the other lights as you move through the house.

The engineers are also working on a cooker that detects when a pan boils dry. Like the bath it warns you and then turns itself off.

Margaret Morgan: Keen to stay in her own home

The BBC showed Margaret Morgan, who is 73, around the house.

She is becoming very forgetful as she gets older and is developing dementia. "It would maintain my independence," she said.

What she liked most was the panel on the wall. It has pictures of a bunch of keys, a purse and some pills.

If you press one of the pictures it sets off a beeper to help you locate the object.

The designers estimate it will cost less than £10,000 to adapt a home to Smart House technology.

They say this is much less than paying for someone to move into residential care.