Home Automation Brings Independence to Residents with ALS
By Julie Jacobson
'Smart home' technology provides improved quality of life to residents with MS and Lou Gehrig’s disease: controlling lights, thermostats and entertainment at Boston's Leonard Florence Center.

Steve Saling escorts me to the house he shares with nine other people, chatting along the way, as he takes me up the elevator and through the motorized front doors of his pad. He shows off the entertainment system in his bedroom, streams some Pandora radio through the in-wall speakers, and adjusts the lights, shades and thermostat just so.

His home automation system is pretty typical, but Saling is not: He has ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Like most of his housemates, Saling has no control over his arms, legs, hands, voice and other faculties. He can move his head pretty well, though, and that’s all it takes to operate a custom control system from Promixis, a mostly-DIY home automation vendor since 1998.




Promixis’ new enterprise-grade control system, called PEAC, is installed at the Leonard Florence Center for Living in Chelsea, Mass., near Boston.

The center, funded in part by the Chelsea Jewish Foundation, opened in 2010 with space for 100 residents in 10 living areas, or houses, each with about 7,000 square feet of living space. Residents — most of them elderly — vary in their ability to manage activities of daily living.

Daily living is especially challenging for Saling and his nine housemates in varying stages of ALS, a disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement.

“When I was diagnosed [with ALS], the doctors told me to get all my affairs in order,” says Saling. One of those “affairs” was to find a suitable home control system and a place where he and other ALS sufferers could live somewhat independently.

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