Chronic Care Management in the Home

Many otherwise busy adults are sandwiched between generations of older and younger relations that rely on them for care. Many baby boomers take responsibility for helping an aging parent retain an independent life in his or her own home, rather than moving to an institutional facility. Others are assisting a developmentally delayed child or grandchild grow into an independent and functional lifestyle. Still others may help a sibling cope with a chronic health condition.

Whatever the situation, there are many opportunities for home technologies to support the important communication and coordination tasks a network of formal and informal caregivers. The same technologies that revolutionized and “flattened” the workplace can now make life easier in the home. These technologies have the potential to greatly reduce health care costs, by allowing people to live independently in their own homes, rather than being forced into institutional care facilities.

Some of the research the Aware Home Research Initiative is capable of or in the process of investigating include:
• Empirical studies of home-based health management practices, including chronic disease care and healthy lifestyle adherence
• Interactive tools that promote health education and care by utilizing sophisticated home health monitoring
• Visualizations and ambient display techniques to present health monitoring results in a way appropriate for the home
• Understanding home support needs of older adults
• Developing a framework for technology acceptance concerns, especially those around privacy and automation issues

Current Projects

Deaf 911

Researchers:  Thad Starner, Ketaki Deo, Nirmal Patel, Zahoor Zafrulla

The Deaf 911 system emulates an TTY (teletypewriter) on a cell phone providing deaf users with direct and easy access to emergency services. Deaf users can dial 911 from a cell phone and communicate with the 911 operator through an Instant Messaging style interface. The software TTY then encodes the text as TTY signals and sends it over the voice channel. Incoming TTY signals are decoded and displayed as text.
More information on Deaf911

Dr. J Says... 

Researchers: Jiten Chhabra, MD, Elizabeth Mynatt
Dr. J Says... is a web based application that makes real-life meal recommendations to its users from the restaurant of their choice based on their health and taste profiles. It represents a class of  tools that use information and communication technologies to translate complex medical guidelines into contextually relevant medical advice. The Dr. J Says... research project is studying the impact of such personalized, pervasive and real-life advice on patient compliance in the area of diet related chronic diseases.     

Early Detection of Developmental Delay

Julie Kientz, Tracy Westeyn, Ping Wang, Rosa Arriaga, Gregory Abowd
We are interested in designing technology to help detect, record, and track important developmental milestones that occur in children during their first 5 years of life. By tracking these milestones, we can help parents and healthcare providers detect developmental delays such as autism, deafness earlier, which can improve the effects of interventions.

MAHI: Facilitating Reflection in Individual Diabetes Management

Researchers: Lena Mamykina, Elizabeth Mynatt.
In many situations in life, people learn by reflecting on results of their past choices and actions. In case of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, reflection helps individuals make more informed decisions and tune their lifestyle choices to keep diabetes under control.  MAHI (Mobile Access to Health Information) is designed as a technology probe to both help us study reflection as it happens in course of individuals' daily lives and to facilitate it by enabling capture and access to past activities and their health impact. MAHI is a distributed mobile application that utilizes a mobile phone's media features to allow easy capture of activity records through verbal descriptions and pictures. At the same time, a glucose meter connected with the phone via Bluetooth helps individuals capture impact of recorded activities on their blood sugar. Individuals can reflect on their records and discuss them with peers and healthcare providers while viewing them on a password-protected website.

Sympathetic Devices (2008-2009)

Researchers: Claudia Winegarden, Brian Jones, Jenna Schmidt, Ted Ulrich, Jae Wook Yoo, Marc Lawson, Josh Tuminella

Sympathetic Devices is a project focusing on communication devices for aging individuals across all levels of housing options. The overarching goal of the project is to address social isolation and depression by first understanding how individuals currently socialize and internalize during everyday activities, then designing devices to help them develop social relationships and support groups, as well as manage personal goals. This research is funded through a joint seed grant awarded by GVU Center and the Health Systems Institute at Georgia Tech. More information on Sympathetic Devices

Talk to the Hand

Researchers: Marc Lawson, Ellen Yi Luen Do

The "Talk to the Hand" device was originally designed as a wireless device worn on the hand to help people learn languages, especially on objects around the home. After understanding some of the other possibilities, the device could also help people with visual impairment recognize objects and improve hand-eye coordination.

More information on Talk to the Hand

Past Projects

Abaris

Julie Kientz, Gregory Abowd
Abaris is a fully functioning prototype capture and access application to support therapists who perform Discrete Trial Training therapy, a current best practice intervention for children with autism. We have evaluated Abaris in homes and schools to determine its effectiveness in supporting data-based decision-making through better collaboration, better access to reliable artifacts, and higher confidence in decision-making. more information on Abaris
http://home.cc.gatech.edu/julie/24

CareLog

Gillian Hayes, Gregory Abowd
CareLog is a mobile capture and access application for recording health and education data in informal settings.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~gillian/research/CareLog.htm


 

Cook’s Collage

Quan Tran, Beth Mynatt
The Cook’s Collage supports a cook’s memory of which ingredients have been added how many times for any recipe. The information display presents a running visual summary of the ingredients’ sequence and counts by capturing images in real-time of the cook adding ingredients by a "wizard-of-oz" simulation (i.e., a human operator hand picks images from live video feed).
http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ecl/projects/dejaVu/cc/index.html

digital family portrait

James Rowan Elizabeth Mynatt
The Digital Family Portrait reconnects family members by providing a qualitative sense of a distant relative�s well-being while striking a reasonable balance between privacy and the need for information. Like a traditional portrait, it is designed to be hung on the wall or propped on a mantle, blending with household decorations.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ecl/projects/dfp/index.html

dude's magic box & grandma's lapdesk

Jim Rowan Elizabeth Mynatt
One function historically performed by aging adults (grandparents) in an extended family is that of the care and nurturing of grandchildren. Clearly, geographical distance disrupts all forms of this function. Technological support that reconnects the grandchildren and the grandparents can not only restore this historically significant function and therefore be of benefit to both parties, it can also address issues of social isolation.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ecl/projects/dude/

FETCH

Julie Kientz, Arwa Tyebkhan, Shwetak Patel, Gregory Abowd
FETCH is a mobile system for aiding the visually impaired in locating their misplaced objects in many locations. Through a focus group and individual interviews with the visually impaired, we discovered a need for a quick, temporary tagging system for frequently lost objects that can be used in many locations. We deployed this system with 4 users in visual impairments on a mobile phone using Bluetooth tags.

Privacy in an Aware Home

Kelly Caine, Dan Fisk, Wendy Rogers & Michelle Kwasny
Older adults in particular stand to benefit from new technologies that use visual sensing devices to collect and share information about residents of smart or aware homes. However, there is little research that explores the privacy concerns older adults may have when choosing whether to use these technologies in their homes. The goal of this study is to examine any potential privacy concerns that older adults may have.
http://www.hfaging.org/projects.html#privacy

Technology Acceptance

Wendy Rogers, Koert van Ittersum, Dan Fisk, Len Parsons, Kelly Caine, Marita O’Brien & Sung Park
This survey of research on acceptance of technology was conducted to identify and clarify those variables that influence technology acceptance, particularly those that related to aspects of the technology itself. The results of this survey are an organizational schema for all of the variables as well specific guidance on the generalized effects of relevant variables such as perceived usefulness, perceived compatibility, and perceived privacy.
http://www.hfaging.org/projects.html

The Technology Coach

Wendy Rogers, Dan Fisk & Irfan Essa
We took an interdisciplinary approach (human factors and computer science) to develop a technology “coach” that could support older adults in learning to use a medical device. Our system provided a computer vision system to track use of a blood glucose meter and provide users with feedback if they made an error. This research has potential for the development of an in-home personal assistant that could coach individuals in a variety of tasks necessary for independent living.

SuperAssist: Personal Assistants for Distributed Supervision of Complex Task environments

Olivier Blanson Henkemans, Wendy Rogers, Dan Fisk
The project aims at developing models for the supervision of older diabetic’s self-care, including maintaining a healthy life style, and use of medical instruments, and communication with remote medical and technical specialists. We specifically focus on the influence of assistant dialogue on the patient self-care, concerning the assistant’s level of automation of the patient level of participation.
http://www.hfaging.org/projects.html#superassist

Living Memory Box

Molly Stevens, Khai Truong, Florian Vollmer, Gregory Abowd
Digital archives of personal memories are becoming increasingly technically feasible, but there remain significant interaction design challenges. In this paper, we present a research and design study of the Living Memory Box, a device and service to assist families in preserving memories in a variety of media forms. Through a series of ethnographic interviews, design activities and focus groups, we have developed recommendations for the design and development of future personal memory systems and appliances.