Charles City ‘smart home’ pilot project installations for seniors begin next week

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Installations will begin in Charles City residences next week on a state pilot project to provide “smart home” technology that will help people remain in their homes as long as they’d like to.

Danny Cunningham, a marketing specialist with Teltex Inc., of Kearney, Missouri, was in Charles City this week meeting with some of the homeowners who will be part of the project, with in-home installations beginning next week and continuing through early June.

The project is a combination of efforts by the city, Iowa AARP, the Iowa Department of Aging, Elderbridge Agency on Aging, Teltex and Apple Computer.

Apple is involved because the equipment Teltex will install will be controlled by the Apple HomeKit system, and the 13 homes involved will each receive an iPad and an Apple HomePod to control everything.

“We’ve worked with Apple for about the last eight years, doing iPad and iPhones for seniors and people with disabilities,” Cunningham said. “We’ve had a long-running relationship with Apple as their partner in that realm.”

Noriene North is one of the pilot homeowners. Visiting with her Thursday morning, Cunningham explained to North, who has macular degeneration and has trouble seeing the settings on her current thermostat, that she will be able to view the setting of her new smart thermostat on the iPad in big numbers.

More than that, she will be able to say, “Hey, Siri, what is the temperature set at?” or “Hey, Siri, turn the temperature up 2 degrees” and the HomePod will hear her and respond.

In addition to that smart thermostat, equipment to be installed will include a smart door lock, video doorbell and some other home automation devices, Cunningham said, as well as some monitoring devices.

“There’s two sides to it – the home automation devices are all stuff that she will be able to control in the house, whereas there’s a monitoring system that’s part of this, that will monitor for things like motion, water overflow, a door being opened or closed, things like that,” he said.

Teltex will set up the system to send a message to North if something that’s being monitored is detected, such as a water overflow, and she can decide how to be notified, such as through a text message or a phone call.

The monitoring can also be for family members’ piece of mind, Cunningham said. For example, the smart door lock can be set to send a message to a family member if a door is opened during the time of the night when the homeowner would usually be in bed. Motion detectors can monitor if the homeowner is moving around during the day.

“They’re looking for different sort of behaviors and things, that everything is normal,” Cunningham said.

The homeowners can choose to share as much or as little information with others as they want.

North said she became involved in the project through Elderbridge, and because she was part of another aging in the home project by the Iowa State University College of Design, where design students made suggestions for four Charles City homes on ways the homes could be remodeled to help people live at home longer.

“That was a little more extensive, because they were (suggesting) knocking walls out,” she said.

Each of the 13 homes in this pilot project will get all of the equipment, installation, setup, service and any needed maintenance for free for three years. After that, they can decide if they want to continue in the program and pay the service fees themselves.

“This pilot is really to see how it works within Charles City,” Cunningham said.

Charles City was identified by the state and by Iowa AARP for the project because the city is an AARP-designated age-friendly community. It received that designation in 2018, becoming only the second such community in the state, behind Des Moines, and the first rural age-friendly community in Iowa.

“On a national scale, Iowa is kind of setting the example and leading the way in utilizing these types of technologies,” Cunningham said. “We’ve got other states that are looking at this pilot as well, to see how they can implement this in their own state. It’s an exciting thing.”

North said, “It’s a good thing for seniors, so we can stay in our own home, because I’m staying here until I can’t take care of myself.”

Cunningham agreed: “That’s the benefit, the whole point of doing this.”