apples/oranges
Granted, different applications, but commercial is commercial.
Perhaps my previous comparison wasn’t clear enough.
apple/pickup truck
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Another thing to consider on top of all the intelligent responses here, is the coverage and cost of liability. If the system glitches and the lights go out while somebody is walking and falls and hurts themself, or if something similar happens that directly or indirectly causes bodily harm to somebody - can your company survive that? Morally do you want somebody’s injury on your shoulders?
I’m not saying that it can’t be done, but you simply can not be too prepared for the unexpected when dealing with the health and welfare of others. Get a lawyer, get an insurance agent, get an accountant and spend a lot of money with all of them consulting before you ever deliver a proposal to the client.
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In a nursing home? Are you mad?
Smart home systems do not work. Honestly. None of them. We are hobbyists and tinkerers, we get a lot of fun and personal satisfaction out of making the lights go on and off and figuring out why they didn’t, but our wives know perfectly well that it’s all nonsense.
If you try to automate care for the vulnerable someone will die.
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Three main issues leap to mind:
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HASS does not have RBAC - Role Based Access Control
RBAC is critical to ensure Resident 1 can’t access Resident 482’s devices, nor what could be considered PII Personally Identifiable Information. 500 instances of HASS on a VM might be possible, but would be horrid to administer.
(A robust naming convention might help, but consider the value to an attacker discovering the network. This comes up at conferences all the time after bored penetration testers find out how badly their hotel room is secured!) -
All centralised technologies have issues scaling.
Industrial and building automation protocols like KNX scale better, but at least will require several controllers (one per floor?) with a central monitor (publish to a separate backbone MQTT broker?).
Many BA systems use distributed control, with sensors communicating directly to devices with central configuration only getting involved when required (e.g. lights out, temperature set point). -
Separating shared infrastructure into residential units is hard.
I worked on a study for a health care provider and the issue back then was that devices assume they are on a single home LAN (broadcast domain). This means kit like a Google Chromecast uses multicast to allow ANY device on the same LAN segment to control it by default. Conversely, public WLAN typically includes device separation to prevent Mallory from attacking Alice and Bob meaning casting and air* can’t work.
This shifts the “create a home unit” problem to the WLAN management layer to map each device to a residential unit, and maintain it.
Family visitors might expect to be able to show their phone pictures on the big screen like they do at home, and those non-IT folk on the wards will get the “my iPad doesn’t work” questions.
Z-Wave has been deployed at scale in large hotel buildings using remote coordinator modules (i.e. one per 1-2 rooms despite a 240 device limit) powered by PoE and controlled centrally over Ethernet. Sadly, the protocols were never released so FOSS couldn’t try to support the hardware.
Stacey on IoT had a report on US insurance providers and condo builders looking to install home automation to reduce maintenance costs (water leak detectors) and provide revenue (monthly fees) but I don’t remember the tech being considered.
If this helps, 
this post!
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I’ve discovered this through my later research since posting this. I saw something called ‘room assistant’ that might have been neat, but seems more focused to tailoring requests to room presence instead of segmenting a ‘network’ of devices.
We currently outsource our network management to a third party sysadmin company that also oversees the company’s Microsoft deployment. They are…okay.
We’re far enough away from actual deployment at this point that I think we could probably get a few extra APs and maybe the ability to segment things off into VLAN by function.
Interesting.
The goal here would be to enable the residents to be less dependent on staff for everyday function and comfort. I appreciate the mention of cost as well as function, a good argument can be made that by reducing the dependence on nursing staff for small tasks such as management of personal electronics/entertainment devices and environmental controls it would increase overall time for care.
An excellent point.
I need to remember to ask about installing backup / lights out walkway lights to mitigate that risk.
Not quite true? I work in occupational therapy and have been able to learn and integrate electronics tinkering and 3d printing to make a lot of unique adaptations for people. Also just buying COTS stuff like an Amazon Fire TV Cube for a high level quad who uses his voice to control his television set.
I’ve got another resident who loves his smart switches which he can use from his phone while he’s trapped in bed waiting on nursing to come, mostly to toggle power to his simple desktop fan which is pointed to the bed. He can’t reach the fan, but can toggle it with a switch.
I also make a lot of custom HID that leverage what mobility certain people have to access tablets/phones/computers.
I have limits though, and I don’t try to automate medical care for people, but giving them access to their own light switch or TV set is a pretty low risk venture.
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I think we
Excellent point, and I think I would indeed be looking at segmenting the network into one per room. Additionally while we will have 160 rooms, we are not looking at 160 active users, some are not physically/cognitively able to utilize system like this, so we can roll it out slowly, I just want a plan that would involve up to that many systems. If it comes to it I might be able to fight for that many subnets.
We get this!
Currently all residents share a single “Resident” WiFi network and it’s a hot mess of shared devices and devices that want me to share audio to and so on. Like dozens of Samsung TVs that offer to screen share and whatnot. Luckily no Chromecasts. Our residents are probably just a hair over the smartphone age or physically unable to use them.
Is this how many can be in the same building, or on the same ‘z-wave network’?
Like if I throw 1000 z-wave devices inside of a single large building, will they clash if they aren’t all paired up to the same controllers? What if I did a controller per room?
You still haven’t enumerated what you want the residents to be able to do and why Home Assistant is the solution.
My MIL is in a home and she is jealous of how much our home is automated and controlled over Alexa. The solution for her was simple. An Alexa Pod and a couple of smart lights and switches. I can’t imagine how Home Assistant would add anything to what she needs.
HA probably won’t add much, node-red might be enough, but the ability to integrate custom MCU solutions into the mix are what I’m really after.
This is an accident waiting to happen.
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Not only an accident. But, a lawsuit!!!
And, a very expensive lawsuit!
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I’d like to re-highlight this comment from above. I’ve no experience with this system, but it looks like it might meet at least some of your needs, and appears to be a commercial-grade system that would be much less likely to expose you to technical, ethical, and legal pitfalls.
The 240 device limit is per Z-Wave coordinator, hence the use of hundreds of remote coordinators powered via PoE and contrilled remotely.
Having so many different Z-Wave radios packed together can’t be good for throughput, but supposedly this works in places like Las Vegas.
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