The worldwide human population is set to inflate by over 2 billion within the coming decades, with the ratios of old and older old forecast to enlarge rapidly in both developed and developing countries. Chronic and progressive disease and disability are positively correlated with advanced ageing. Global financial instability, fiscal deficits, high unemployment and an enormous predicted energy shortage represent the global backdrop to the task of providing safe and secure accommodation and/or medical supervision to elderly cohorts, both now and in the future. Smart homes are living spaces facilitated with technology that allow individuals to remain in their own homes for longer, rather than be institutionalised. Sensors are the fundamental physical layer with any smart home as the data they generate is used to inform decision support systems, which is turn facilitate appropriate actuator actions. The appropriateness of actuator actions is thus crucial in providing safety and security to a smart home inhabitant. The positioning, amount(s) and field of view(s) of sensors is therefore a fundamental characteristic of a smart home. Contemporary smart home sensor distribution is aligned to either a) a total coverage approach, or b) a human assessment approach. These methods for sensor arrangement are not data driven strategies, are unempirical, and frequently irrational. The overall aim of this thesis was to develop and test a novel sensor distribution paradigm for the optimisation of resources. Four chronological studies were conducted. Studies 1 and 2 investigated the problem of how to acquire inhabitant spatial frequency data from a smart home environment, which was robust to the range of ambient conditions prevalent in an indoor scene, unobtrusive, efficient and which provided privacy to the inhabitant and their home. Studies 3 and 4 investigated what methods could be applied to these spatial frequency data to determine the most optimal sensor distribution per inhabitant, unique to each inhabitant’s movement behaviour and environmental physicalities. These investigations propose novel application of existing methods. In addition, the presented sensor distribution optimisation paradigm is proposed as a novel concept in the implementation and dissemination of smart home technology.