ABILITY HOUSE SMART HOME: BEHIND THE SCENES WITH THE
TECHNOLOGY EXPERTS
Presenter(s)
Chet Cooper
ABILITY Awareness
1001 W. 17th Street
Costa Mesa CA 92627
Day Phone: 949) 854-8700 ext 312
Fax: (949) 548-5966
Email: chetc@abilitymagazine.com
Presenter #2
Romney Snyder
ABILITY Awareness
1001 W. 17th Street
Costa Mesa CA 92627
Day Phone: (949) 854-8700 ext 307
Fax: (949) 548-5966
Email: romney@abilitymagazine.com
Exploring the technology that went into creating ABILITY’s
first Smart Home. Panelists include the program founder, technology experts and
the homeowner who has quadriplegia.
Complete Paper: When Derrick Daniels was seventeen, his friends were
playing with a gun they didn’t know was loaded. The gun accidentally went off
and the bullet hit Daniels, paralyzing him from the neck-down. He then spent 10
years following the incident living at his mother’s house, facing the
frustration that comes with living in an inaccessible home. As Daniels’ search
for a new home progressed, it quickly became evident that nearly every home
would require extensive modification to be wheelchair accessible. He then
learned about the ABILITY House program.
The ABILITY House program is a nonprofit enterprise working to construct
accessible homes for low-income families where one or more members have
disabilities, while at the same time engaging people with disabilities from the
community as volunteers to help build the homes. Every ABILITY House employs
universal design elements and meets the criteria of visitability
(i.e., people with disabilities who don’t live in the home can still visit it
with ease). The basic visibility features include a minimum of one no-step
entrance, hallways at least 36” wide, and one bathroom on the first floor with
a 32” doorway. In addition, each ABILITY House incorporates various
accessibility features to accommodate the specific needs of the homeowner.
Our presentation describes the technology implementation that took Daniels’
ABILITY House from a home to a smart home. The ABILITY House Smart Home was
built in partnership with ABILITY Awareness, ABILITY Magazine and Habitat for
Humanity of Greater Birmingham, Alabama. Hewlett-Packard, the home’s technology
sponsor, donated and installed a HP Pavilion Media Center; smart-home
environmental controls programmed to control the lights, doors, TV, radio and
other appliances in the home; head tracking device; onscreen keyboard; and a
professional voice-activated dictation package. The home also featured extensive
voice-activated phone services donated by BellSouth, a corporate sponsor of the
home, a ceiling lift provided by SureHands Lift and
Care Systems to transport him from his bed to the shower and an automatic
residential door donated by
The presentation will include discussions with the programs founder; the
technology experts who installed the software and a conference call to Smart
Home owner Derrick Daniels. The technology experts will explain the technology
they installed, the trials they encountered and how they corrected potential
issues to get software from multiple vendors communicating effectively. Daniels
will explain how the technology allows him to perform tasks he couldn’t
previously do on his own. Attendees will be able to ask questions of him in
real time about the technology, the ease of use and how it benefits him on a
daily basis.
Daniels’ home, as with every ABILITY House, was built primarily by
volunteers, about half of whom themselves had disabilities ranging from paraplegia
to blindness and mental illness to developmental and intellectual disabilities.
Hewlett-Packard continues to support the ABILITY House program through
sponsorship of its College Students with Disabilities Initiative. The
initiative works to connect disabled student services centers with their local
Habitat for Humanity affiliate to engage students with disabilities in planning
and building ABILITY Houses.
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