Imagine using a robot in a home-care setting. What tasks would you want the robot to perform? How would you want to interact with it? Would you treat it as a companion or as a machine? What if it made a mistake? These are just some of the questions to consider as the reality of a functioning home care robot becomes more of a possibility.
The Georgia Institute of Technology’s Aware House is getting closer than ever to this technological advancement. Aware House, located adjacent to the Atlanta campus, is a 5,040 square-foot home that functions as a “living laboratory” for interdisciplinary design, development and evaluation of home-based technologies. Enhancements to the Aware House help researchers capture video and other information about how patients might react to various technologies in the home-care setting.
Originally built in 1998 as a test bed for high-bandwidth applications in a home setting, the home is “aware” of its occupants’ whereabouts and activities. Uses of the Aware House have evolved and expanded through the years to include technology issues related to homebound patients.
One recent project at the Aware House involved the use of the PR2 assistive robot provided by personal robot developer Willow Garage of Menlo Park, Calif. The Aware House was used to study how older adults might react to a robot in the home. The test involved a robot performing simple tasks like picking up objects or delivering medication.
What about the emotional aspect of interacting with automation? One study considered the reaction of patients if the robot failed to turn on a light switch. Results of another study showed the need for a robot to face an individual when waiting for a command, even though the robot could function just as well turned in any direction. The study proved that people depend on social cues even when interacting with a robot. Research suggests that people might start treating a robot in the home as a companion and may even be more willing to confide in the robot than a family member or health-care provider.
How a home-care patient would react to a robot is only part of a broad range of research projects at Georgia Tech using the Aware House as a resource. Many projects at the Aware House bring together practitioners of multiple disciplines, including mechanical engineers, computer programmers and psychologists from Georgia Tech’s Human Factors and Aging group.
Work at the Aware House centers on understanding aging and what it means when designing technology for adults to use in the home, including issues as basic as screen size and font sizes. The home also aids in the understanding of what an aging adult will accept and what they won’t, and how they understand information presented to them to improve their health.
“First you have to understand the audience you are designing for, understand their challenges and how to best target their needs,” according to Brian Jones, director of Georgia Tech’s Aware House Research Initiative. In-depth studies at the Aware House include using one-on-one interviews and focus groups as tools. Corporate involvement in the Aware House includes companies such as Verizon, AT&T and Qualcomm that are looking for ways to target the growing pool of potential customers age 65 and older.
In addition to the Aware House, Georgia Tech is also launching a health technologies research project called HomeLab that will use a pool of 550 individuals age 50 and older to test products in their own homes and provide feedback to researchers.
Projects being tested at Georgia Tech’s Aware House encompass mobile applications that can aid health, medication tracking solutions and telemedicine. Sensing technologies inside the Aware House, including cameras, can help researchers study the behavior of individuals in the environment and consider how analyzing activity might be useful. For example, if a person’s nightly bathroom visits increase, it might indicate a need for medical attention. What if the patient sleeps sitting up in a chair rather than in bed? Beyond what can be learned from these observations, how much privacy is a patient willing to give up in exchange for the benefits of home health technology? Would a patient sacrifice more privacy to avoid going to a nursing home?
Exploring the impact of technology on home care requires the involvement of multiple research disciplines that might not otherwise be expected to intersect, but they all come together at Georgia Tech’s Aware House.
“We have many researchers involved, and it’s not just a project to build a smart home,” Jones said. “We use the Aware House as a tool, or as a sandbox where researchers can come together, including engineers and computer interaction specialists. We focus on the human side, too, not just the technology side.”
