
NSF Org: |
IIS Division of Information & Intelligent Systems |
Recipient: |
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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 2020 = $20,000.00 |
History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
107 S INDIANA AVE BLOOMINGTON IN US 47405-7000 (317)278-3473 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
901 E. 10th Street Bloomington IN US 47408-3912 |
Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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Parent UEI: |
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NSF Program(s): | HCC-Human-Centered Computing |
Primary Program Source: |
01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
Program Reference Code(s): |
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Program Element Code(s): |
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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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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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