Exploring Patterns of Activities of Daily Living in the Home Environment

Background: Senior citizens tend to live longer and longer independently. Judging whether a senior person is still capable of living on his own is often based on the occurrence of incidents, with all consequences thereof. In the specific case of early dementia, the symptoms are not immediately apparent and the occurrence and severity of incidents progress gradually over time. In this case, the children or grandchildren are burdened by the question whether or not the elderly adult can still live safely and independently in his or her own home. This decision is only based on input obtained through incidental visits. We believe that the capability of independent living can only be objectively judged, by a health professional, if long term objective information on the elderly person's daily activities of living (ADL) is available

Rigor, Relevance and Impact:The Tensions and Trade-Offs Between Research in the Lab and in the Wild

As an interdisciplinary field, CHI embraces multiple research methods, ranging from controlled lab experiments to field studies in homes and communities. While quantitative research in the lab emphasizes the scientific rigor of hypothesis testing; qualitative research in the wild focuses on the understanding of the context of technologies in use, and each type of research has a correspondingly different kind of impact. This panel invites researchers with varied backgrounds to talk about the tensions and trade-offs between research in the lab and in the wild, with respect to scientific rigor, real-world relevance and impact. The goal is to enhance mutual understanding among researchers with diverse goals, values and practices within the CHI community

Home Occupancy Agent: Occupancy and Sleep Detection

Smart homes of the future will have a numberof different types of sensors. What types of sensors and howthey will be used depends on the behaviour needed from thesmart home. Using the sensors to automatically determine ifa home is occupied can lead to a wide range of benefits. Forexample, it could trigger a change in the thermostat setting tosave money, or even a change in security monitoring systems.Our prototype Home Occupancy Agent (HOA), which we presentin this paper, uses a rule based system that monitors powerconsumption from meters and ambient light sensor readings inorder to determine occupancy. The agent is also able to determinewhen the occupants are asleep, and thus provide the potentialfor further energy saving opportunities

Collecting Shared Experiences through Lifelogging: Lessons Learned

The emergence of widespread pervasive sensing, personal recording technologies, and systems for the quantified self are creating an environment in which one can capture fine-grained activity traces. Such traces have wide applicability in domains such as human memory augmentation, behavior change, and healthcare. However, obtaining these traces for research is nontrivial, especially those containing photographs of everyday activities. To source data for their own work, the authors created an experimental setup in which they collected detailed traces of a group of researchers over 2.75 days. They share their experiences of this process and present a series of lessons learned for other members of the research community conducting similar studies