Award Abstract # 1814725
CHS: Small: Collaborative Research:Toolkits for Aging in Place for Older Retirees (TAIPOR)

NSF Org: IIS
Division of Information & Intelligent Systems
Recipient: TRUSTEES OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: July 31, 2018
Latest Amendment Date: April 6, 2020
Award Number: 1814725
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Ephraim Glinert
IIS
 Division of Information & Intelligent Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: August 1, 2018
End Date: July 31, 2023 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $254,446.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $274,446.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2018 = $254,446.00
FY 2020 = $20,000.00
History of Investigator:
  • Katie Siek (Principal Investigator)
    ksiek@indiana.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Indiana University
107 S INDIANA AVE
BLOOMINGTON
IN  US  47405-7000
(317)278-3473
Sponsor Congressional District: 09
Primary Place of Performance: Indiana University
901 E. 10th Street
Bloomington
IN  US  47408-3912
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
09
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): YH86RTW2YVJ4
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): HCC-Human-Centered Computing
Primary Program Source: 01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7218, 7367, 7923, 9102
Program Element Code(s): 736700
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

Many older people want to live in their homes for as long as possible. Much computer and sensor-based technology is being developed and deployed to support aging in place, ranging from fall sensors to complicated systems that monitor all of a user's activities and provide reminders, warnings, and alerts to family and caregivers. However, by and large such technology has been designed by engineers rather than the end users. As a result, adoption and acceptance of these systems by older adults is low. The project will begin with studies and focus groups of retired adults to determine the kinds of technological support elders actually want in their homes. Next, the project will create an easy to use "toolkit" that will enable an elder to create and customize a system to use in her own home. Finally, the project will create training materials to help ordinary people learn to design these technologies. As a result, this project will lead to the development aging in place systems that better meet the needs of elders and find more widespread acceptance. In addition, project will bring together people of all ages to engage in intergenerational design, including a workshop where Girl Scouts will collaborate with their grandparents to learn about each others technology needs and utilize the toolkit.

The project, TAIPOR, builds on sociotechnical research in personal informatics that engages underserved populations in making their own customized technologies for tailored personal use and identifies perceptions related to adoption and abandonment of pervasive computing technologies by the people who live with them. TAIPOR research can be abstracted into three areas: (i) Identify Perceptions related to Adoption and Abandonment of IoT through contextual, qualitative studies where older retirees document their experiences with aging in place technologies. Investigators will develop a set of design guidelines and highlight exemplar IoT that meet older retiree needs. (ii) Design a Toolkit to Create and Customize IoT by novice, older retirees with minimal training. Based on the design guidelines, the investigators will develop a toolkit that abstracts the functionality of the exemplar IoT to enable older retirees to create their own aging in place technologies. (iii) Develop Scaffolded Training Materials so that older retirees can develop their own technologies with limited researcher intervention. Design workshops have arisen as a way to involve the end user in the design of technologies, but require significant resources on the part of researchers and are not scaleable. The investigators will disseminate a set of best practices for how to teach older retirees, an underserved population, about making at scale.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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(Showing: 1 - 10 of 16)
Choi, Yong K. and Lazar, Amanda and Demiris, George and Thompson, Hilaire J. "Emerging Smart Home Technologies to Facilitate Engaging With Aging" Journal of Gerontological Nursing , v.45 , 2019 https://doi.org/10.3928/00989134-20191105-06 Citation Details
Harrington, Christina N and Jelen, Ben and Lazar, Amanda and Martin-Hammon, Aqueasha and Pradhan, Alisha and Reeder, Blaine and Siek, Katie "Taking Stock of the Present and Future of Smart Technologies for Older Adults and Caregivers" A Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Quadrennial Paper , 2021 Citation Details
Jelen, Ben and Freeman, Anne and Narayanan, Mina and Sanders, Kate M. and Clawson, James and Siek, Katie A. "Craftec: Engaging Older Adults in Making through a Craft-Based Toolkit System" TEI '19 Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction , 2019 10.1145/3294109.3295636 Citation Details
Jelen, Ben and Lazar, Amanda and Harrington, Christina and Pradhan, Alisha and Siek, Katie A. "Speaking from Experience: Co-designing E-textile Projects with Older Adult Fiber Crafters" Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction , 2023 https://doi.org/10.1145/3569009.3572736 Citation Details
Jelen, Ben and Monsey, Susan and Siek, Katie A. "Older Adults as Makers of Custom Electronics: Iterating on Craftec" CHI EA '19 Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2019 10.1145/3290607.3312755 Citation Details
Jelen, Ben and Siek, Katie A. "Hands-On with Paper Circuits: Quickly Prototyping Interactive Designs" 2ND ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ON HCI EDUCATION , 2020 Citation Details
Jelen, Ben K. and Richards, Olivia A. and Whitman, Samantha Cassie and Ongwere, Tom A. and Kresnye, K. and Siek, Katie "Exploring the Use of Electronics to Customize Pervasive Health Technologies with Older Adult Crafters" Proceedings of the Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth 20) , 2020 Citation Details
Lazar, Amanda and Jelen, Ben and Pradhan, Alisha and Siek, Katie A. "Adopting Diffractive Reading to Advance HCI Research: A Case Study on Technology for Aging" ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction , v.28 , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1145/3462326 Citation Details
Lazar, Amanda and Pradhan, Alisha and Jelen, Ben and A. Siek, Katie and Leitch, Alex "Studying the Formation of an Older Adult-Led Makerspace" Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445146 Citation Details
Lazar, Amanda and Su, Norman Makoto and Bardzell, Jeffrey and Bardzell, Shaowen "Parting the Red Sea: Sociotechnical Systems and Lived Experiences of Menopause" Proceeding CHI '19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2019 10.1145/3290605.3300710 Citation Details
Pradhan, Alisha and Findlater, Leah and Lazar, Amanda ""Phantom Friend" or "Just a Box with Information": Personification and Ontological Categorization of Smart Speaker-based Voice Assistants by Older Adults" Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction , v.3 , 2019 https://doi.org/10.1145/3359316 Citation Details
(Showing: 1 - 10 of 16)

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

 

 

Our work began with deployments of technology, design workshops, and interviews with retired adults to determine the kinds of technological support they actually want in their homes. 

We found that study participants used home-based voice assistants (perhaps the most widely distributed IoT technology for older adults) for accessing online information, with health-related information being the most commonly sought. This finding leads to questions to be addressed by future work on information credibility in a non-visual, voice-only interface (particularly with respect to health information). While using voice assistants for the purposes of reminders may seem like a natural application of this technology for this population, our studies also revealed specific challenges. Participants expressed concerns related to incorporating the use of the device into their own routines (e.g., having to remember to set the reminder), as well as distrust of technology and technology infrastructure (e.g., power outage, internet failure), making them less likely to rely on the device for this purpose. Other challenges posed by the technology included the need to remember specific keywords for commands, errors in speech recognition, and the device timing out while the user was attempting to use it. These findings point to the need to increase accessibility and trustworthiness of home-based voice assistants.

We worked with older adults to learn about how they could use small electronics to create interactive technologies. We found that older adults enjoyed creating paper-based circuits and integrating electronics that were easy to read and physically large enough to secure to artifacts. From these findings, we created two different types of toolkits - (1) a soft, flexible toolkit that could be integrated into artifacts with conductive thread and (2) a hard, wood cut toolkit that could be integrated into artifacts with magnets. Overall, older adults appreciated the hard, wood cut toolkit - even when working with fabric materials. Since the final studies were done during the pandemic, digital written and video training materials were created to help older adults use the toolkits. Older adults wanted more video training materials to integrate more functionality into the toolkit. Toolkit designers should investigate what materials people use in their everyday lives to create intuitive circuit connections.

This project trained 5 doctoral students, many undergraduate researchers, and two public school teachers. In terms of outreach, we worked with university alumni associations to host classes with assistance from undergraduate students for older adults about smart home and maker technologies.  We also co-organized research experiences for undergraduates from historically excluded groups in computing. Finally, we worked with older adults and retirement communities to support technology use.

Regarding the purposes for home IoT technologies, many participants we worked with were less interested in using what are traditionally thought of as technologies for aging (such as medication reminders), and instead designed technologies to take care of their house (e.g., remind them about unlocked doors and windows, or remind them to change air filter, furnace filter), and technologies to better organize paper-based notes at home


Last Modified: 12/06/2023
Modified by: Katie A Siek

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