Today, however, the Ryan School is being reincarnated. This summer, a local community-service agency will solicit bids for turning the old school into a refurbished, 31-unit independent-living residence for low-income people aged 55 and older. In itself, that’s a worthy goal, but the Charlottesville-based Jefferson Area Board for Aging (JABA) has even loftier plans. JABA and its team of architects are developing a scheme that could make the Ryan School a model for future high-tech assisted-care facilities throughout the country.

They plan to turn the structure into an “age-smart building” that uses electronic monitoring and data-analysis technologies to help keep its seniors healthier and safer than if they lived without any type of supervision. “These technologies offer great hope, especially for our population,” says Gordon Walker, JABA’s C.E.O. “In rural areas, people move to nursing homes an average of two years earlier than in urban areas. The longer we can delay nursing-home admissions, the more everybody wins.” The facility is slated to open in 2004.

Early warning system

Hidden throughout the Ryan School’s apartments will be a digital lifeline for residents. The core components—motion detectors, PCs, and data-analysis software—aren’t unusual in and of themselves; each is widely used in conventional building security and retail applications. Rather, it’s how these technologies are being used (and some fear misused) that makes the project noteworthy.

Rather than watching for intruders or studying shoppers’ habits, the monitors will be placed near key areas of the apartments, including around stovetops and medicine cabinets. The goal is for caregivers to receive early warning signals if a resident leaves the stove on or neglects to open a cabinet where daily medications are stored, says Hunter Greene, AIA, director of architecture for LMW, a Roanoke-based engineering and architecture firm working on the project.

JABA is developing the elder-care monitoring system with the help of the University of Virginia’s Medical Automation Research Center (MARC). The researchers at MARC expect that by monitoring mundane activities like shower usage and how often the refrigerator door is opened, the system can develop a daily activity profile for each resident. If a normal activity isn’t undertaken for a day, a resident manager, family member, or rescue squad may be alerted.

According to Dr. Majd Alwan, MARC’s director of elder-care technologies, the key to success will be using ubiquitous but nonintrusive sensors. “We don’t use any cameras or microphones—anything that would be perceived as invasive,” he says. One prototype places motion detectors in floor mats to track a resident’s activity level.

Alwan says privacy considerations are guiding his research. MARC uses standard encryption techniques borrowed from business applications to scramble the data collected about individuals to ensure that personal information doesn’t become available to prying eyes.

MARC’s is one of several university research projects across the country that target new uses of computer technology for elderly housing. In May, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology established the “Changing Places” consortium, a joint effort of its Media Laboratory and Department of Architecture, to study sensing technologies for proactive health care, among other topics. The Georgia Institute of Technology operates the Aware Home, a test bed for unobtrusive monitoring devices [Record, March 2002, page 165]. One device embeds sensors in a picture frame to record movement in a room

and develop activity patterns for residents. If these patterns change significantly, custom-designed analysis software issues an alert to appropriate recipients. Dr. Gregory Abowd, associate professor at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, calls the sensors “technologies of awareness.” “This could give people the option of staying in their own homes longer,” he says. He adds that large technology companies, including chip-making giant Intel, are becoming interested in the commercial potential of digital devices for senior citizens.

Not all of the residential monitors for the elderly are test-bed prototypes, however. Residents of Oatfield Estates in Portland, Oregon, now wear badges that send activity data via infrared or radio-frequency signals to detectors installed in walls and ceilings. The information then travels to a central computer, where staff members can track the location and movement of each resident throughout the day. Other sensors record each person’s weight when they lie in bed, or use infrared instruments to take vital signs, such as temperature and blood pressure.

The badges are off-the-shelf security devices. Oatfield’s four- person software-development staff wrote custom assisted-living programs. The data collected about residents are archived in a central computer, and Oatfield is now considering giving each of its staff members handheld organizers that would allow them to view residents’ data remotely.

Page 1 of 2