Americans are living longer and more fulfilled lives, and they desire to live as independently as possible. But independent lifestyles come with risks. To address these issues, researchers are developing "smart home" technologies to help older adults remain independent at home while controlling costs. Smart homes enhance residents' safety and monitor health conditions using sensors and other devices. Such technology can help keep older adults independent while controlling costs. The PIs have proposed a model of decline in older adults in which mobility and cognitive impairments lead to functional decline, thereby reducing independence. Appropriate interventions, if offered in a timely manner, can improve functional ability. The key is early identification of changing conditions that indicate impairments. In this project, the PIs will establish a partnership among faculty, students, and researchers across diverse schools within two universities, in order to develop and evaluate intervention technology for elders. They will utilize a unique eldercare facility in Columbia, called TigerPlace, to study technology targeting mobility and cognitive impairments. Project objectives include: development of an integrated monitoring system that reliably captures data about the elder residents and their environment in a noninvasive manner and balances the needs of health safety and privacy; collection of data in typical independent living, elder settings, using the integrated monitoring system; development of algorithms to extract patterns of activity from the collected sensor data; and evaluation of the usability of the technology and investigation of fundamental issues in human-computer interaction for the population of older adults. To these ends, a monitoring system developed by one of the participants and incorporating gait, physiological, and environmental sensors will be extended. An event-driven video sensor network will be developed to generate an "anonymized" video stream that hides identifying features of the residents, and sensor and video data will be fused and processed for identifying patterns of behavioral activity. Fundamental human-computer interaction (HCI) issues as related to elders will also be investigated. Deliberative evaluation and usability studies will be conducted.
Broader Impacts: This project will have broad impact on our society, by offering a model for eldercare technology and by providing policy makers with answers to complex questions of cost effectiveness and outcomes to help guide decisions about services for older people, such as those funded by Medicare and Medicaid (it is estimated that 12.4% of the U.S. population was over 65 in 2000, and this percentage is projected to grow by 2030 is 20%). From the technical point of view, the research will advance the state of the art in HCI for elders, in anonymized and compressed video, in extracting human motion and behaviors from video data, in extracting human activity from sensory events, and in fusing sensor and video data for identifying behavioral patterns. In addition, the project will train both graduate and undergraduate students and help establish an infrastructure in conducting future research projects; faculty and administrators from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, MO will assist the PIs in recruiting traditionally underrepresented nursing and CIS students for multi-disciplinary teams and summer internships.
