This project provides funding to develop HomeSHARE, a community infrastructure for doing research around aging in place that provides the community with access to a network of smart homes with a standard sensor package and the ability to add custom technology as needed for specific studies. Currently, although there is much research interest in using home-based sensors to model mobility and health, setting up these kinds of studies is difficult and there is little infrastructure to support it. This tends to cause duplicate, wasted effort in setting up sites; very small numbers of participating homes, limiting the generality and power of the research; and incompatibilities in the setups used by different teams that make it hard to put different pieces of research together. To address this, the team will create the backbone of a large network of homes that can support research that uses sensed information to predict a number of attributes about older adults at home, including mobility patterns, mental health, hospital readmissions, and energy use. The main activities are to deploy their suite of sensors and other computing technology in a total of 30 volunteers' homes at two partner institutions, and develop software that connects and collects data from the homes. Team members will work carefully with residents of the homes to cover the costs of technologies and address privacy and technical concerns they have. They will also create materials that cover technical, ethical, and training issues that other researchers can use both as client sites to conduct studies using the existing network (for a fee to cover operating costs) and as installation sites who join the network directly by adding their own smart homes. To manage demand for the infrastructure, the team will create a governing board of researchers drawn initially from the awardees' institutions. This board will review the technology needs and applications for studies to ensure that they meet the ethical and research goals of the project. The hope is that through this research, the infrastructure will pay for itself many times over not just in knowledge but in improved health and life quality outcomes for older adults; it will also provide service- and project-based learning opportunities for a number of graduate and undergraduate students.
The network will consist of a number of homes using a standardized technology package to ensure consistent, reliable, and secure data collection and data sharing across the many studies while also addressing privacy and acceptability concerns for participants. It will include a number of window and door sensors, a wearable activity tracker, a tablet computer for communicating with and collecting survey information from residents, a wireless access point and paid internet access, and an in-home server that manages the installed devices and data. The servers will be connected and managed with an enhanced version of the team's existing Piloteur framework for reliable sensor data collection in homes. Piloteur will be extended to support larger-scale deployment and changes in the standard technology package demanded by technology advances and research needs, and will add a layer for storing, securing, and sharing the data using existing open standards. Installation sites will be run by technicians supervised by the research team. The technicians will handle recruiting and communicating with participants as well as deploying and debugging the technology installations in the homes, and participants will be recruited to ensure diversity along demographic factors that should improve generalizability of results. The team will also develop materials to make it easy for other researchers to use and join the network. For those who want to access the existing network for individual studies, they will develop a HomeSHARE Study Packet that includes guidance on study planning and costs, technical aspects of the homes and data, and sample materials from prior studies that have been approved by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). For those who want to join the network, they will create a HomeSHARE Site Kit that includes information about best practices around recruitment and installation, sample IRB materials for existing sites, and standard budget information useful for writing proposals to join the network. A leadership committee initially composed of researchers from the awardee institutions will oversee project management, including the coordination of studies using the network, the evolution of the standard technology package, the addition of new installation sites to the network, and the administration of the data sharing and costs.
