SmartHome Research

CareWheels Living Lab Apartment:

CareWheels Pine Point Living Lab Apartment Schematic

Objectives:


Commonplace SmartHome technologies provide new tools to extend home health care resources. Computational methods are being developed to infer the performance of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and occurrences of behaviors and events requiring intervention. Researchers have identified several crucial challenges that must be solved to begin implementing practical sensor-based SmartHome applications, such as determining:

  • an individual’s identity in a multi-person household,

  • what sense-able activities are useful determinants of wellness,

  • whether a person is at home (and possibly incapacitated) or away,

  • how to close the feedback loop between prompting and task fulfillment.


We established our Living Lab as a residential test-bed to evaluate innovative TeleCare technologies. For example, here is a graph comparing the wake-up times measured by two sensor-based systems with the "ground truth" - that is, the participant's self-report, obtained by date and time stamped emails.

Question: Why are there gaps in the graphed data around the 17th and 23rd of the month?
                 (Hint: These days are about one week apart. See the answer below.)


Answer: Our participant was away those weekend days, visiting friends and family. The crucial question is: Can a SmartHome infer whether the person is merely away - or incapacitated in their home - in need of help?