  Smart homes are becoming ubiquitous, but they are not Americans with
Disability Act (ADA) compliant. Smart homes equipped with ADA compliant
appliances and services are critical for people with disabilities (i.e., visual
impairments and limited mobility) to improve independence, safety, and quality
of life. Despite all advancements in smart home technologies, some fundamental
design and implementation issues remain. For example, people with disabilities
often feel insecure to respond when someone knocks on the door or rings the
doorbell. In this paper, we present an intelligent system called "SafeAccess+"
to build safer and ADA compliant premises (e.g. smart homes, offices). The key
functionalities of the SafeAccess+ are: 1) Monitoring the inside/outside of
premises and identifying incoming people; 2) Providing users relevant
information to assess incoming threats (e.g., burglary, robbery) and ongoing
crimes 3) Allowing users to grant safe access to homes for friends/family
members. We have addressed several technical and research challenges: -
developing models to detect and recognize person/activity, generating image
descriptions, designing ADA compliant end-end system. In addition, we have
designed a prototype smart door showcasing the proof-of-concept. The premises
are expected to be equipped with cameras placed in strategic locations that
facilitate monitoring the premise 24/7 to identify incoming persons and to
generate image descriptions. The system generates a pre-structured message from
the image description to assess incoming threats and immediately notify the
users. The completeness and generalization of models have been ensured through
a rigorous quantitative evaluation. The users' satisfaction and reliability of
the system has been measured using PYTHEIA scale and was rated excellent
(Internal Consistency-Cronbach's alpha is 0.784, Test-retest reliability is
0.939 )
