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 the Pine Point Project, the first living laboratory for pre-senescent persons with disabilities serving as proxies for frail elders, 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 merit-based grants from the Intel Research Council, Proactive Health Group.

In 2004 we partnered with CleverSet, Inc. on the project: Home Sensor Data Fusion to Support Aging in Place with a SBIR Phase-I grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) / National Institute on Aging (NIA). We built and evaluated Dynamic Relational Bayesian Network models using the data sets generated in the living lab. Our subsequent NIH/NIA Phase II grant award funded research to build a prototype activity tracker that would detect and track a subset of activities of daily living, create alerts about meals and medications, detect anomalies such as falls and infer changes in the health status of an individual over time.

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.

Following the 2008 global financial collapse, CareWheels began building the first open source Locally Organized Value Exchange (LOVE), a mutual credit and time bank, to strengthen community based care services by empowering elders with technologies to age-in-place with help from peer-based support networks. To help fill the growing gaps in our state social services, we are exploring how to leverage Interdependent care (I-care) technologies, social networks and community currencies together to co-produce, provision and remunerate home based monitoring and community based support services. Our goal is to embrace the social and financial caregiving challenges of the growing demographic of Americans who will be aging at home, in their communities, during a period when they are likely to face increasing austerity & diminishing social services. By the end of 2010, CareWheels had received letters of support from our local, county and state representatives and senior services stakeholders.