Aging in Place.
Company. IBM Accessibility - IBM Research
Role. Lead UX Researcher and Designer
Type. Web/Mobile Application - Proof of Concept
Project Description
This was a special project for IBM Accessibility to create smart homes for seniors and those “aging in place.” The goal was to build an AI monitoring system that would understand patterns of individuals in their homes and notify care professionals of any negative deviations. Seniors would thereby be able to remain in their homes rather than multiple in-and-out visits to a care facility.
Summary
I went on location in Portland, Oregon for three days of ethnography at a senior care facility in order to understand how professionals manually care for seniors.
Nursing Professionals
Staff reported that seniors were making multiple visits back and forth between their homes and the care facility creating a very difficult situation for the facility as well as the families of the seniors. If better monitoring could be done in the homes, urgent issues could be avoided altogether. At the very least they would be much less severe and perhaps handled by family members.
I also observed many troublesome, complicated manual procedures for recording and storing information. Antiquated systems alerted nursing professionals of problems and nursing shift changes involved handwritten notes with personal descriptions of events during the day.
I began to create dashboards based on real data coming from test sites where sensors had been placed around the living spaces of test subjects. This interface would allow care professionals and family to monitor the status of their loved ones remotely.
Timing of activity in the home was key to determining whether something was going wrong or it was just normal daily activity. A major part of this project was creating a visualization that would show a twenty-four hour view of alerts.
Mobile
The success of the system depended on a mobile version of the application for nursing professionals to continue caring for others or for family to be out and about.
The Technician
In order to setup and monitor systems in the homes of seniors, technicians would need to be able to service the system. I created storyboards of this experience.
I created a dashboard prototype for the technicians to view installed sensors with current status. Administrators could order work done through an automated system of work orders and view the status of the requests.
