Broadband wireless access standards, together with advances in the development of commercial sensing and actuator
devices, enable the feasibility of a consumer service for a multi-sensor system that monitors the conditions within a
residence or office: the environment/infrastructure, patient-occupant health, and physical security. The proposed service
is a broadband reimplementation and combination of existing services to allow on-demand reports on and management
of the conditions by remote subscribers. The flow of on-demand reports to subscribers and to specialists contracted to
mitigate out-of-tolerance conditions is the foreground process. Service subscribers for an over-the-horizon connected
home/office (OCHO) monitoring system are the occupant of the premises and agencies, contracted by the service
provider, to mitigate or resolve any observed out-of-tolerance condition(s) at the premises. Collectively, these parties are
the foreground users of the OCHO system; the implemented wireless standards allow the foreground users to be mobile
as they request situation reports on demand from the subsystems on remote conditions that comprise OCHO via wireless
devices. An OCHO subscriber, i.e., a foreground user, may select the level of detail found in on-demand reports, i.e., the
amount of information displayed in the report of monitored conditions at the premises. This is one context of system
operations. While foreground reports are sent only periodically to subscribers, the information generated by the
monitored conditions at the premises is continuous and is transferred to a background configuration of servers on which
databases reside. These databases are each used, generally, in non-real time, for the assessment and management of
situations defined by attributes like those being monitored in the foreground by OCHO. This is the second context of
system operations. Context awareness and management of conditions at the premises by a second group of analysts and
decision makers who extract information from the OCHO data in the databases form the foundation of the situation
management problem.
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