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By Barbara Knecht

Not everyone reacts well to the prospect of “surveillance,” but for many, the advantages of aging in place will vastly outweigh the alternative of going to assisted care before it is necessary. Gregory Abowd, associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing in Atlanta and former director of its Aware Home Research Initiative (www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ahri/), offers this approach: “We are starting with the first challenge: to create an ‘aware’ environment that is autonomous. Then, if you are able to make an environment that is aware of activity and occupant location, what valuable services can you build to support human need?” An aware environment is one that knows who is in the house, where they are, and perhaps what they are doing. Abowd observes that the current focus is on personal health, but the applications will be used for safety, security, and sustainability throughout the house.

 

At the Georgia Tech Aware Home, a Digital Family Portrait (above) hangs on the wall like a painting and reports occupant activities and weather reports while displaying images of family members. With the “Gesture Pendant,” containing a wireless camera (left), occupants can control ordinary household devices by making hand gestures in front of the lens. Photography: Courtesy Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Tech Aware Home is a laboratory in a conventional-looking house, which opened in May 2000. The array of experiments in the Aware Home is designed to support everyday activities and, more specifically, the cognitive changes that happen with aging. Diminishing short-term memory may be the most noticeable symptom of aging. With memory-aid technologies, it will be possible for people to look back to see if they have added sugar or salt to a recipe, to find where they left their keys, or to see if they took their medicine. Tracking activity by camera is one method, and one that we undergo so often in the public domain that it may eventually become more pervasively acceptable at home. “The playback may be still shots, for example, that are taken when the sensor identifies that a relevant activity has taken place,” explains Abowd, “but we don’t yet have the full refinement of the sensing activity.”

“The key is that the user controls the information,” explains Rochester’s Horwitz. “The information is captured on a computer within the house.” How and to whom it is distributed is the consumer’s choice.

Motion sensors are the typical way to track a person’s activity, but several years ago, Abowd began experimenting with a load sensor (that records pressure caused by a person’s weight) in a floor tile to see if it could characterize and then follow a person through the house. While it worked to a degree, it was very difficult to scale it out over the whole house. More recently, he has been experimenting with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), the technology that is used to track your car and deduct toll road payments. A tag on your shoe sends a signal to the computer through antennas in mats on the floor. Eventually, molecular nanotechnology (MNT) will allow these antennas to be fabricated at the nanoscale and embedded into building materials.