This award supports planning for the "Home-based Smart Health Applications across Research Environments" (HomeSHARE) test bed, intended to be a geographically-distributed, in-situ test bed to design, develop, and evaluate pervasive home-based technologies. Addressing the growing societal need to support an aging population, researchers continue to create innovative home-based systems to support older adults as they age in-place. However, researchers find it hard to assess how generally useful systems will be because they lack resources, access to diverse populations and research infrastructure. The work supported by this award will identify the next steps to developing a robust infrastructure to support better research in this area, leading eventually to better home-based systems for aging in place.
Specifically, the research objectives of this planning grant are to identify the needs of various CISE research communities for a HomeSHARE testbed with respect to hardware, software, data sharing and coordination mechanisms. The PIs will work with researchers to better understand what technologies are required for a standard, baseline HomeSHARE installation, what technologies may be needed beyond the proposed baseline package for specific projects, what processes should be in place to add technologies to a subset of homes, and how the PIs can make each HomeSHARE site as self-sufficient and easy to maintain as possible. To determine and validate these requirements, the PIs will facilitate workshops at top conferences in pervasive healthcare, ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, software engineering, machine learning, privacy-enhanced technologies, and gerontology to identify research community needs and work with experts in each domain to confirm findings.
In addition to proposing an initial test bed of 100 homes, the PIs will address the issues around sustaining such a test bed over time, as well as growing the initial HomeSHARE test bed in the future. HomeSHARE will be informed by best practices in industry and academia to ensure that researchers can easily utilize the test bed and results can be shared for replication and further analysis. This award supports planning HomeSHARE for a single target domain, aging-in-place, to allow for common, shared parameters for the recruitment of participants across multiple research studies, but the creation of this test bed will inform other CISE home-based research efforts and accelerate the pace of discoveries and their implementation as well.
The broader impacts of the HomeSHARE planning activity include professional development opportunities for researchers who take part in HomeSHARE planning workshops, and cross-disciplinary outreach to gerontology research communities. If implemented, the HomeSHARE test bed itself will have a positive societal impact by supporting development systems for the next generation of older adults to age in place, thus improving the quality of life for older adult participants. The supported research has the further potential to increase economic competitiveness for health care, to increase diversity of the STEM workforce by attracting members of underrepresented groups by providing research opportunities with real-world impacts, and to provide innovative interdisciplinary educational opportunities.
