Deploying HA across 160 rooms in a nursing home for accessibility. How? Looking for opinions from those who have done commercial deployments!

[xgpt (Paul)]

@hebom

• I would also make sure everyone involved knows who’s responsible for the (poor) WiFi and other network-issue’s (put it in writing); it’s going to hurt your systems performance, the user experience and possibly or probably your brand/reputation.

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.

[xgpt (Paul)]

@hebom

maintenance technician for a company that implements nurse call systems

Interesting.

[xgpt (Paul)]

@ServiceXp

your ultimate goals are

@MaxK

be associated with why you want to do this.

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.

[xgpt (Paul)]

@roussell

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?

An excellent point.

I need to remember to ask about installing backup / lights out walkway lights to mitigate that risk.

[xgpt (Paul)]

@Stiltjack

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.

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.

[xgpt (Paul)]

@FloatingBoater

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.

I think we

@FloatingBoater

• 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!)

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.

@FloatingBoater

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.

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.

@FloatingBoater

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.

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?

[stevemann (Stephen Mann (YAML-challenged))]

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.

[xgpt (Paul)]

@stevemann

You still haven’t enumerated what you want the residents to be able to do and why Home Assistant is the solution.

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.

[Stiltjack]

@xgpt

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.

This is an accident waiting to happen.

[jeffcrum]

Not only an accident. But, a lawsuit!!!

And, a very expensive lawsuit!

[PecosKidd]

@jpenyc

You’d be better off looking at available options such as Caavo

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.

[Stiltjack]

I see their legal department has produced a safety document.

[FloatingBoater (James Derrick)]

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.

[hebom (Christiaan)]

@xgpt What is it that you want to provide? I have the idea that I’m overthinking this way too much. From what I understand now is that you want to provide the elderly with a platform to automate their homes. I’m just guessing that you want to implement HA into a home of an elderly, explain them how things work and how they can manage things; a sort of reseller. If you can avoid being liable for any misuse, misconfiguration, interruption or denial of service and if you can get the people to agree that this is “hobby-project” then you could implement Home Assistant Green - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io) with Home Assistant SkyConnect - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io) or something like Google Home or Alexa. Personally I think HA is (way) to complicated for the elderly.