Applications of sensors for in-home elder support

The number of retirees in the US is continuously increasing in proportion to the total population as the baby-boomers in the United States age. As these retirees age they are in need on continuous medical treatment and care which impacts the percent of the national budget placed on healthcare. As healthcare issues with the retirees they are often moved by their family members to assisted living facilities or to nursing homes. This movement is costly to both the family members and to the government agencies paying for or subsidizing their care. The proposal brought forth in this thesis is to design a sensor based system that should reduce the need for personnel and enhance elder\u27s quality of life by affording them more independence allowing them to live at home longer; The purpose of this thesis is the evaluation of different sensor types with regard to benefits, specificity of sensor signal to the function being monitored, drawbacks, reliability, acceptance levels by elders, privacy concerns. The design concepts for sensor assembly\u27s configurations under the special set of criteria that must be applied in the homes of elders, information of reliability studies: signal threshold levels, resolution of potential conflicts or false positives. Finally an inference engine R&D: Drawing inferences and conclusions from signals and temporal sequences, correlation with other signals, signal validation and plausibility analysis. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Smart Home Technology Effect on Behavior, Cognition, and Wellbeing of Individuals Aging In Place

As many older adults prefer to age in place, there is a possibility of elevating the Quality of Life (QoL) via implementing smart home technologies, specifically Voice-Controlled Intelligent Personal Assistants (VIPA). This study explores the acceptance and user behavior of older adults who utilize such devices and how it affects caregivers in providing care and peace of mind for caregivers and older adults. The research method adopted for this study consisted of a qualitative thematic analysis of verified Amazon Echo Dot 3rd Generation reviews, posted on Amazon's website, that involved the keywords senior, elderly, grandparents, and caregiver. The reviews were extracted via a web scraping software, ParseHub, that helped organize and export the reviews into a Microsoft Excel workbook to prepare for coding that data. The reviews provided insight into how seniors and caregivers utilize the VIPA device to age in place, helping determine relevant themes. The dataset was obtained after filtering through 1,048,808 online reviews by keywords and set the search criteria concerning the reviews type set to verified only. The datasets included 414 verified online reviews that contained the keywords senior, elderly, grandparents, and caregiver. The process resulted in forming eight themes, which are entertainment, communication, companionship, learning and news, emergency and security, reminders and alarms, home automation, and shopping. The users, seniors, and caregivers gave insight into how they utilize the VIPA device, which helped understand the most common uses of VIPA devices among older adults. Moreover, some of the reviews included additional information that indicated an elevated Quality of Life after acquiring and using the VIPA device, such as a senior with visual impairment using the smart speaker to control their home lights via voice commands

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference