Responsive Home
Before the opening of the new Home Lab, CUHTec previously had a 3-bedroom bungalow on the University of York campus which was furnished as a "living home" laboratory. This Responsive Home contained demonstrations of various technologies and equipment for recording and analysing user behaviour in a domestic setting. This facility was hired out for meetings and used as a viewing facility for user studies.
Tele consultation demonstration
Video links are currently being proposed as a way of enabling care professionals to talk to patients in their own homes. The need for the features listed above were pinpointed in research carried out by the University of York in 1999 in a study of three sites that used ISDN- 2 video to link primary medical care centres to hospitals. The results are still very relevant to the video links currently being proposed to enable care professionals to talk to patients in their own homes.
The demonstration, conceived and implemented by Simon Fletcher and Andrew Monk, uses low cost security cameras. The camera and stand for the room view can be seen in figure 2. The paper describing these findings in much more detail is available as a .pdf in the members? area of the CUHTec web site (www.cuhtec.org.uk). Reference: Watts, L. A., & Monk, A. F. (1999). Telemedicine: what happens in teleconsultation. International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, 15(1), 220- 235.
The demonstration has the following features:
1. High quality, hands free audio: needed because consultation is mainly about talking and more than one person may need to speak with the consultant and hear what they are saying.
2. A view of the whole room: one needs to know who else is listening. Consultation often covers delicate topics, one needs to know if, for example, a neighbour or relative is in the room but out of sight of the camera (see lower right panel).
3. A (very) close up view: consultation is often about specific parts of the body. It is also often useful to view equipment close up (see lower left panel).
4. The same view at each end: problems that occur when talking over a video link often arise because one person assumes that the other can see something that is actually not visible to them (the patient).
Demonstrations in the kitchen
The kitchen contains a number of demonstrations of technology to support independent living. These include: a rise and fall sink, a telecare monitoring system, a fridge that can give spoken advice about its content and, an easy to use mobile phone with just two buttons. The living area contains entertainment technologies including a TV screen saver that acts as a message board and printed photos that play sounds.
A sink that can be raised and lowered for wheel chair users. This is the only example we have of electronic technology that aids people in their activities of daily living, as opposed to monitoring for emergencies as in the telecare system pictured below.
This fall detector supplied by Tunstall can wirelessly communicate with the carephone and get help via a call centre.
This fridge anticipates RFID tags being used to label individual packages so that it would be possible to look up sell-by dates etc. An animated avatar uses new natural language processing algorithms to advise the owner of the fridge on what to throw away, recipes and so on. This sort of advice system would be invaluable to people who have cognitive problems, or just anyone who wants to know what is in their fridge from a distance. The SmartFridge is one of the demonstrators being built as part of the UDA project. The SmartFridge was built jointly by Lexicle and The University of York.
Loneliness and isolation are major problems for the elderly yet recent advances in communication have largely passed them by. This demonstration shows how cell phone technology can be adapted to purposes more suited to older people. The 2-button phone displays a pictures of one of the (few) people with numbers programmed into it. You have two choices, "yes"; (phone this person), "no" (show me another).
Much of our research involves visiting people in their own homes and talking to them about how they use technology. One such recent study for Samsung revealed that people find large TVs ugly when they are off. The picture depicts a TV "screen saver" that displays a message board when you are not watching programmes.
An audio photo desk. Prints are placed on a "magic mat" that plays some associated sound file that may be ambient sound recorded at the time it was taken, music or commentary. This was built in the Electronics department for Hewlett-Packard labs Bristol. It works by recognising the pictures via a web cam mounted above the mat.
Click here to see more images of the Responsive Home.
