Intelligent The Sense LoungerSlipcover: an Exploration of RealisticEstablishing an Ubicomp Beachhead in Elders’ Homes Ubicomp Technology for the Current Home.
Amy Hurst, John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, Chris Atkeson, Francine Gemperle, Carl DiSalvo, Michel Peeters, Nassim Jafarin, Ron Kemnitzer {}
ABSTRACT
In this paper we describe the Intelligent Sense SlipcoverLounger, a prototype that simply and cheaply turns a lounge chair into an initial “ubicomp” device in a home;a technology providing a that we see as a beachhead for making ubiquitous computing in the homefor transforming the home into a rich ubicomp environment a reality. The Sense Lounger Intelligent Slipcover is a sensor package that includesemploys fabric sensors that are sewn into a chair’s slipcover and force sensors on each leg to in order to sense detect both an occupant and their activity. Taking a user-centered design approach, we explored the needs and opportunities for instrumenting the homes of elders in order to help them age in place. Drawing insights from user needs, we developed the Sense Lounger to (i) fit into the home and lifestyle of elders, (ii) assist and add value to the lives of elders, (iii) provide a platform for expanding assistive devices within the home environment. the occupant. We have designed the Intelligent Slipcover to be a realistic sensor because it is inexpensive, comfortable and provides valuable sensor data. We have focused on designing the intelligent slipcover to meet elder’s needs for technology in the home, but we believe it is generalizable to everyone. This work is the product of our user centered design approach that includes elder interviews and a focus group about elders about this type of technology.
Keywords
Interaction design, design studies, assistive technology, eldercare, aging in place, ubicomp
ACM Classification
H.5.m Information interfaces and presentation (e.g. HCI)
INTRODUCTION
There For many years researchers have explored the promise of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) technology in the home; however, both has a lot of work on ubiquitous computing for the home over the years; however there users and product development companies have been reluctant to bring these developments into their homes. hasn’t been a lot of adoption of it in people’s homes. We feel that this lack of acceptance is due to many reasons, specificallyResistance comes from privacy concerns, cost,and aesthetics, ease of use, and the inconvenience of heavily instrumenting the entire home environment. Additionally,there are people who are uneasypeople will continue to resist using ubiquitous computing technology in their home until they can see that the benefits easily outweigh their concerns about accepting technology into their homes because they don’t see that the benefits are worth it.
We feel that elders are one of theElders provide one of the most interesting demographics that can benefit the most from this typewith respect to ubiquitous computing technology because they are an audience that can clearly benefit from the technology. Elders As elders age, they frequently spend a lotmore and more timeof time in their homes and as they age, often require assistance to keep up with the tasks of daily living. They can get some assistance from family, friends, and health care works, but technology may also be able to play a positive role in their lives. Acceptance of ubiquitous computing devices and environments offer the elders an opportunity to stay in their homes longer.they require more assistance. This assistance is most frequently provided by family members or health care workers, but there is a tremendous opportunity for it to be partly provided by technology in the home.
As elders require more assistance, they frequently move to environments with higher levels of care, such as assisted living facilities or nursing homes. Elders in these facilities may be an ideal population to take early advantage of ubiquitous computing technology because they live in(i) the environments are both smaller and more controlled living environments, usually one or two bedroom apartments and have similar layouts, which are easy to equip with technology. Additionally, and (ii),there is an opportunity for the facility can directly benefit from the technology to both reduce staff intervention and to provide more granular information to care providers. to decide to put it in all of the facility.
Elders are also an important population for ubiquitous technology researchers because of The need for technology ftheir increasing numbers. The US Census Department elders is going to increase as their population grows. It has been predicted [17] that the elderly population in the United States (65 and older) will double from 34 to 68 million by the year 2028. In order to have well designed assistive technology by that timethen, we need must begin to put some form of thisplacing technology in the homes now. Our solution is to do this through instrumenting the chair that elders spend most of their time in with some simple technology.
[INSERT BETTER opening sentence here]While the elder demographic offers a great opportunity, they also provide some significant challenges through their resistance to bring technology into their homes. They do not want to spend their time learning complicated interfaces; they do not want their homes to look like maximum-security prisons; and they do not want to surrender control of their lives to machines.
One of the main barriers to acceptance of whole-house ubicomp systems is that they are complicated,and can be invasive, expensive, and generally aesthetically unpleasant. Many people have a strong resistance to accepting cameras in their homes, due to privacy issues. Other people don’t will not want to accept thepurchase, install, or even allow thenecessary large number of gadgets devices and technologies to that make a room level systems work. , and see it as too invasive to their current home life. We also believe that there is a bias towards rRoom-based technology can also appear to be that it is“ too smart” and autonomous for an audience that is already ceding control of their lives to family members and healthcare workers.. We feel that a dHowever, technology that comes into the home through their much loved and frequently used chair may provide the best opportunity for convincing elders of the benefits of larger ubicomp systems.esign where the technology is isolated in the chair will be more accepted than one with technology throughout the house.
Figure 1. The Sense Lounger (left)
exposed view of Sense Lounger’s sensors (right)
We have observed that most elders have one spot in their home where they spend most of their time [PPR chairside… what is the exact reference?]. There is a strong relationship between these elders and their chair, so they are unlikely to replace it for a new chair that has technology embedded in it. However, we feel that they are likely to accept this technology in the form of a chair slipcover, which goes over their existing chair and doesn’t look or feel like technology.
Technologically speaking, the chair is a very interesting place to do sensing because it allows us to put sensors very close to the body, without actually attaching them. This is an excellent non-invasive way that bio sensing can be easily integrated into an environment.
We have designed and built a slipcover that can easily and quickly turn any chair into a sensor for ubiquitous technology in the home. We see this slipcover being used as input to many applications to assist elders in their daily lives. In this paper we will describe the information gathering and design process we went through in order to design this slipcover sensor.RELATED WORK
There are many social issues related to ubiquitous computing [1] such as privacy, control, visibility and security, which can affect its acceptance into the home. Social attributes and cultural judgments can also influence elder’s willingness to accept assistive devices [5]. We have designed the Sense Lounger with these factors in mind, in order to achieve a technology that will be realistically accepted.
Whole-home ubiquitous computing projects are those where a home is built from the ground up or an existing home is modified and filled with technology to make it a living laboratory. There [S1]are several ongoing research projects [9,smtart 10,14] and industry related ones [8] that are building whole-home ubiquitous computing technologies. These homes are equipped with multi-camera vision systems, and large sensor networks. The combination of these technologies enablecombination of these technologies enablesthem the “house” to track any personindividualsin the house andand record theirknow a lot about their activities. However these whole-house systems require a lot of infrastructure and are very expensive.
These whole-home systems involve the acceptance of a lot of technology into one’s home and can be intimidating to people unfamiliar with technology. There have been other projects which have smaller footprints which we feel are more acceptable for the home, such as The Digital Family Portrait [15]. This is a remote display of an elder’s activity in the home over time, and is designed for people not in the home. This display is generic and adaptable so it can be used with a variety of sensors in the home. We see our Intelligent SlipcoverSense Lounger as one possible potential input device for this or related activity communication systems system.
MIT’s media lab has developed a Sensing Chair, [19] which uses two very expensive pressure sensor sheets manufactured by TekScan Inc. These pressure sheets are placed on the seat and back of an Aeron office chair and measure the amount of pressure applied to each part of the chair. They have developed software that is able to determine the posture of the chair’s occupant, and use this as real time input to a computer system. Fay et al [3] have developed a Smart Couch which is able to recognize the occupants sitting on it, by using load cells to detect the weight of the couch’s occupants. While we feel that these technologies are extremely useful, we feel that they are technological overkill and too expensive to be realistic technology that would be adopted in people’s homes, especially elder’s homesOur approach differs from theirs in two distinct ways. First, we focus on maximizing the value of inexpensive sensors, and second, we do not require users to replace a chair that may have high sentimental value.Through our research we have found that replacing their chair is not an acceptable solution for most of the elderly demographic.
Beaudin et al [2] explored ubiquitous sensors for data collection using a variety of sensors including ones worn by the home’s occupant and others which were located on objects in the home. In this work they recommend that “sensors be place wherever possible without regard to estimated use frequency” and they also recommend that the “visibility of the sensors be minimized” (Beaudin, 1360) what is format?). Since elders currently perform so many activities in their chair, we feel that by only instrumenting it, we will be able to get enough data and application value to gain entry into the home.
While most of these related works have taken a technology approach first approach, our work is unique in that we are approaching this problembenefits from combining the methodologies offrom both a design and technological technology researchstandpoint. We have also adopted the research goal of making ubiquitous technology that is conforms to Raymond Lowey’s MAYA design philosophy: of developing products that are the “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable” [12]. This can be tricky to achieve when designing for any audience, and especially elders because they frequently have barriers to the acceptance of technology. Throughout this paper we will discuss these barriers that we have discovered and how we have designed our technology to overcome them.
NEEDS ASSESSMENT
Elders can be a difficult demographic to design for because they are frequently resistant to accepting new products or technology unless they feel it helps them enough. Our first step was to learn the needs of the elders that we were designing for, so we could address them with technology.
Our early work was inspired by an ethnographic study of 17 elders living independently in their homes [4]. This work focused on the private home as the context, and looked specifically at how problems with products and the environment provided signs of decline and a need for assistance. Based on the analysis of the ethnographic data, we next identified 53 opportunities for new technologies to assist the aging population. We grouped these into five main opportunity areas, which included leaving a legacy, controlling the environment, health and wellness, social and emotional communication, and chairside and bedside.
Interviews
In order to learn more about elders’ relationships with their chairs, we went to an assisted living facility in suburban Pittsburgh and interviewed 7 elders (4 women and 3 men) about their chairs. We interviewed them about the furniture in their home, and where they spend the most time in their home. We were also interested in seeing if they had a dominant chair that they spent the majority of their time in, and what they did in that chair. We used the directed storytelling approach to learn what they do in their chair by asking them “How did you use your chair yesterday?” The audio for these interviews were recorded and later transcribed, and we photographed their chair and them in their chair. We analyzed our data by listening to the audio recordings and analyzing the images and coding these for similarities and trends.
We focused on elders living in assisted living facilities because (i) they have moved from their home and are able to reflect on their lives before and after the transition, and (ii) their move indicates their awareness of the need for some assistance. Generally, as elders move to more assisted living facilities, they are also moving into smaller living spaces. As a result, they must reduce their furniture and belongings when they move to these facilities, so they usually only bring furniture that is particularly meaningful or useful. The elders we interviewed had moved from particularly large homes (three or four bedrooms) to one or two bedroom apartments, and had all had to reduce their amount of furniture by a great deal. Elders in assisted living facilities are also getting the level of care that we want to be able to provide with technology to elders at home. This is a reason why learning about their needs can help us understand what needs people at home might have.
We saw several themes while analyzing these interviews, but here we will focus on the two most dominant ones: the attachment these elders had to their chair, and how they used this chair as a “command center”.
Chair Attachment
During these interviews we saw people with many different kinds of chairs and sofas. The most common type of chair was a heavily padded recliner. A few people didn’t have a chair that they spent their time in, but had one particular spot on the sofa.
The elders we talked to had many different reasons for choosing their chair. Some of them had doctors who had recommended specific types of chairs, such as one that allowed them to put their feet up. One interviewee mentioned that she is just more comfortable in her chair than she is in most others. She says this is because the chair “fits her.” Some elders also mentioned that there were certain chair designs that they simply could not sit in, because they wouldn’t be able to get out of. These were usually overstuffed chairs.
While conducting these interviews we saw that many elders had a very strong attachment to their chair. This attachment was strong for many reasons. One of these is that some of the elders we talked to were very chair-bound and spend most of their day in the chair, so they had spent a lot of time thinking about what chair is right for them. Another major reason for this strong attachment to the chair is that they had been using the same chair for many years.
Figure 2. Chair as command center, representative chair and objects that surround it.
Additionally, we talked to people who had a sentimental attachment to the chair because it had been passed down in their family for a long time.
We also observed that as elders’ requirements for a chair changed as they aged, they would keep their existing chair instead of buying a new one. We saw several cases where people had augmented their chair with a headrest or an additional cushion underneath, to make it more comfortable.
Chair as Command Center