On Tuesday, January 16, Pennsylvania Assistive Technology Foundation hosted the webinar, Real-Life Stories: Building a Comfortable Smart Home, with guest speakers Suria Nordin and Kirby Smith. Suria and Kirby shared their knowledge and experience building their new home with the latest smart home technology. Suria and Kirby purchased the home adjacent to their home in Old City, Philadelphia, and set forth with the project of incorporating the newly purchased home with their existing home and making a cohesive, accessible smart home.
Suria was injured in 2014 resulting in quadriplegia. Kirby, with his background in technology, immediately started exploring technology to make their home more accessible for Suria, who continued working part time as a CPA for a public accounting firm, specializing in international tax. Kirby described their first home as smart home version one. Kirby and Suria shared how their first smart home evolved because they were early adopters of the first iterations of the Amazon Alexa. As Kirby described it, the first iteration of their smart home was messy! There were exposed wires everywhere and the technology was extremely visible. Kirby did research on electronics so he could build their first automated door opener.
In their new home, the technology is very discreet helping to keep the home looking neat with an overall sleek look with clean lines. Many of their original smart home technology devices are in their new home. Some of their smart cameras are over eight years old and still functioning as they did when brand new. One of the pieces of advice they shared is the placement of outlets in ceilings to help minimize running electrical cords for ceiling-mounted cameras.
Want to learn more about what Kirby and Suria shared in the webinar? Below are the links for recordings of the webinar. The recording in English has captioning and ASL interpretation. There is also a recording with Spanish language interpretation. You will also find a PDF of the PowerPoint presentation.
English recording and ASL interpretation
Spanish language interpretation
Download Powerpoint presentation slides (PDF)