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Digital Family Portrait
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Everyday Home Assistants
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Aging in Place with Technology
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Constantly Connected
Memory Aids
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Software Engineering (Ga Tech)
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Assistive Technology for Cognition
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Machines Roll in to Care for Elderly
digital family portrait
By denying the casual daily contact that naturally
occurs when families are co-located, the geographic distance between extended
family members makes casual, lightweight observation or "keeping an eye out"
for family members impossible. Technology that reconnects geographically
distant extended family members by allowing them to remain aware of each other
in a non-obtrusive, lightweight manner can provide the peace of mind required
to allow aging family members to age in place. The Digital Family Portrait
reconnects family members by providing a qualitative sense of a distant
relative’s well-being while striking a reasonable balance between privacy and
the need for information. Like a traditional portrait, it is designed to be
hung on the wall or propped on a mantle, blending with household decorations.
Instead of a static frame, the digital frame changes daily, reflecting a
portion of the person’s life. From general measurements of activity to
indications of the weather, the portrait attempts to capture the observations
that would naturally occur to someone living next door or in the same home.
[More
Info]
[G4TechTV Article]
This project is funded by the
Ga Tech Aware Home Research Initiative.
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Remote controls, with tiny buttons, complex
interfaces, and an uncanny ability to get lost in the couch are part of
everyday life. Imagine instead controlling your home appliances with a wave of
your hand. Several projects are addressing the area of devices in everyday
life. The “Gesture
Pendant†recognizes, and then translates gestures
into commands for your home appliances. Our “Context-Aware Universal Remoteâ€
helps people to control multiple devices throughout the house via one remote
device. The research into Blood Glucose Monitor devices seeks to provide
accurate and timely assistance to those performing self-testing in the home.
[More
Info]
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Everyday life is full of short, medium and long term memory issues.
In the case of daily household tasks such as cooking, short and medium term
lapses can be a significant distraction. Iirrevocable memory lapses can occur,
such as “Did I add the baking powder to the brownies?†Or, “Where did I put
that bill?†Projects such as the “Cook’s
Collage†and “Finding Lost Objects†are
researching how to assist users in resuming interrupted activities. In the case
of long term memories we are looking at ways of enhancing people’s ability to
capture, archive and the then access memories of everyday life. Projects such
as the “Living Memory Box†and the “Family Video Archive†are developing
techniques for the semi-automated tagging of context with multi-media memory
artifacts.
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Aging in Place with Technology: Study Reveals Older Adults
will Sacrifice Some Privacy to Remain in their Homes Longer
Younger adults might cringe at the thought of being
monitored in their homes by technology. Yet a new study from the Georgia
Institute of Technology indicates that older adults are willing to give up some
privacy -- if it enables them to remain independent longer.
"That illustrates how important it is to older adults to stay in their homes
rather than move into some type of assisted-living housing," said
Wendy Rogers, a professor of
psychology at Georgia Tech. Rogers presented preliminary findings of the study
at CHI2004, an international conference on computer-human interaction held
April 24-29 in Vienna, Austria.
The study, which examined older adults' perception of a
technology-rich home environment, was part of the multidisciplinary
Aware Home project conducted at
Georgia Tech's Broadband
Institute Residential Laboratory. The laboratory,
funded in part by the Georgia
Research Alliance, is a unique three-story house
where researchers focus on domestic technologies for the future. The study
Rogers presented was funded by the
National Science Foundation and the
National Institutes of Health.
[More
Info]
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CONSTANTLY CONNECTED: UNIQUE RESIDENTIAL LAB STUDIES HOW
TECHNOLOGY INTERACTS WITH AND AFFECTS DOMESTIC LIFESTYLE
A residential laboratory that will be constantly
connected via broadband communications opens today to study how technology
interacts with and affects domestic lifestyle.
The Georgia Institute of Technology Broadband Institute
Residential Laboratory will be capable of knowing the whereabouts, activities
and vital medical profiles of its inhabitants. Thus, it can effectively use the
always-on communications capability to enhance lifestyle and family
connections.
The three-story, 5,040-square-foot home will host a
broad range of computing and telecommunications research funded by federal
money and corporate support. Its design and construction was funded by a
$700,000 grant from the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA).
"Research in the Residential Laboratory will focus on
the confluence of communications connectivity and lifestyle computing," said
Broadband Institute director Dr. Nikil Jayant.
"One of our goals is to discover technology combinations
that can unobtrusively enhance lifestyle in the home of the future - both for
special classes of inhabitants such as older citizens and infants, and for
families in general," added Jayant, who is also a professor of electrical and
computer engineering and a GRA eminent scholar.
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It is a challenge to simplify how the information gleaned from a
variety of sensors is made available to application developers – the who, what,
where, when and how of everyday life. We are developing and refining the
“Context Toolkit†to support rapid prototyping of home applications that
leverage knowledge sensed from the environment.
Many of the services being designed for the Aware Home involve
retrieving recordings or images from past activities. We are developing generic
support (INfrastructure for Capture and Access, or INCA) to assist in building
applications that involve capturing live experiences and making them available
for later access.
Other software construction projects:
• Secure storage for managing personal information
• Stampede: space-time memory abstraction for interactive multimedia
• Impact of Industry standards (e.g. uPnP) on aware environment infrastructure.
Sensing devices deliver enhanced services by collecting raw data about people
and transforming that data into high level information about human activity.
Working from legal precedence, we are assessing privacy concerns raised by the
collection of the data, the information produced, and the dissemination of that
information to other people in other times and places.
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Intelligent Cognitive Orthotics (Assistive
Technology for Cognition)
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Read about
my recent testimony on this technology
to the U.S. Senate Committee on Aging.
Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Intel
Corporation
The world's population is aging. Today,
approximately 10% of people alive are over the age of 65, and slightly more
than 1% are over 80. By 2050, those numbers will increase to 21.4% and
4%, respectively. Older adults may face a range of challenges:
physical, social, emotional, and cognitive. We are focusing on the last
of these, by designing intelligent cognitive orthotic systems--systems
that are intended to help people who have suffered cognitive decline,
especially decreased memory and/or executive functioning. Cognitive
orthotic systems may also be beneficial for younger people who have suffered
traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Our current system, Autominder, provides reminders
to a person about his or her daily activities. Where some other
reminder systems function in a manner similar to alarm clocks, issuing
fixed reminders at pre-specified time, we employ Artificial Intelligence
technology to construct
rich models of a person's activities, including constraints on the times and
ways in which they should be performed; to monitor the execution of those
activities; to detect discrepancies between what a person is expected to do and
what he or she actually is doing; and to reason about whether and when to issue
reminders.
Autominder was initially designed and built as part of
the Initiative
on Personal Robotic Assistants for the Elderly, a
multi-university, multi-disciplinary research effort conceived in 1998, and
funded by the National Science Foundation. Our partners in the initiative
are Carnegie
Mellon University and the
University of Pittsburgh. Additional support has come from the
Intel Corp. through its Proactive Health Care Program. Versions of Autominder
have been deployed on "Pearl", a custom-designed robot designed and built
by members of the Initiative at CMU, but we are now also investigating
alternative platforms for Autominder, including handheld and wearable
devices. Preliminary field-testing is underway with TBI patients.
[More Info]
For more
information about Autominder, see the publications by contact Prof.
Pollack.
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Contact: Claire Bowles
claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk
44-207-331-2751
New Scientist
Machines roll in to care for the elderly
"IT'S just a collection of bloody nuts and bolts." That
was the damning reaction of a 69-year-old resident at a Scottish nursing home -
let's call him William Brown - when asked if he would like a robotic pet as a
companion to help relieve his boredom and loneliness. But once he realised that
the robot could play games with him, he quickly changed his mind.
"I would enjoy playing dominoes or chess with it,
definitely," he later said. Brown's initial reaction was typical of people's
responses to the raft of new technologies designed to help old and infirm
people lead independent lives.
"There is a lot more we can do before resorting to
intrusive technologies," says Andrea Lane of UK charity Help the Aged. "Nothing
can replace a visit from a human and support from the community." But Eric
Dishman, a health technology expert with Intel in Hillsboro, Oregon, is not
surprised Andrew was eventually won over when the technology's benefits became
apparent.
People are far less concerned about technology intruding
on their lives if the alternative is boredom or a loss of independence, he
says.
The message from the technologists is that gadgets will
play an increasing role in helping old people to cope. Because people in the
developed world are living longer, the slice of the population potentially
requiring specialised healthcare in later life is growing rapidly: the UN
estimates that by 2050 the proportion of the world's population over 60 will
double.
"Today's healthcare systems simply cannot scale up to
meet the needs of this coming age wave," says Dishman. "The only choice is to
focus on technology that lets people help themselves." Robots like the
companion offered to Brown are just one of those technologies.[More
Info]
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