Corporation Information

CareWheels was founded in March 2001 to:

  • Perform scientific research to develop Internet-enabled Assistive Technologies that will provide TeleCare Services for people of all ages with disabilities.

  • Educate working-age people with disabilities about the use of these innovative Internet-enabled Assistive Technologies to support their independent living and improve their quality of life.

  • Promote social welfare by providing innovative TeleCare Services to people of all ages with disabilities and particularly the growing population of frail elders.

Our Mission

To develop 21st Century solutions for our aging society – home health care technologies and services for healthy aging, that maximize our dignity and independence, based on these connected values:

  • People are responsible to participate in their own health care decisions, and therefore have the right to be as informed and active in the process as they are willing and able to be.

  • Health care providers, both professional and familial, act in partnership with the persons for whom they care and with each other. Therefore, they too have the right to be informed and actively supported in the caregiving process.

  • Technology has tremendous potential to facilitate the information and support processes that are essential for responsible and effective caregiving by streamlining communications, automating repetitive and persistent tasks and redistributing resources to maximize the availability of human caregivers when and where they are most needed.

Brief History

In the Spring of 2001, we began our formative research, including expert interviews and focus groups with:

  • Oregon Department of Human Services In-home Care Services Administrators

  • Legacy Health System’s Powerful Tools for Caregiving Project Managers

  • Kaiser Permanente's Aging Network Director, Expanded Care Managers and Staff, including Home Health Workers

Starting in 2002, we built one of the first living laboratories for pre-senescent persons with disabilities at the Pine Point Apartments in Portland, Oregon to study SmartHome technologies via a novel participatory design strategy. This work was funded by four successive grants from the Intel Research Council, Proactive Health Group. In partnership with CleverSet, Inc. and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) / National Institute on Aging (NIA), we are building and evaluating Dynamic Relational Bayesian Network (DRBN) models using the data sets generated in the living lab. Our current NIH/NIA Phase II R&D effort will develop technology that can detect and track a full range of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) in the home, deliver ADL assessments, recommendations, risk assessment and anomalous incident reports, imbuing future CareWheels SmartHomes with embedded assessment and inference generating capabilities.

In April 2006, CareWheels received its IRS Final Determination Letter, classifying us as a non-profit public charity exempt from Federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.