Jesus Favela

A Web-based system to facilitate elders communication with their families living abroad

The aging of the population is a phenomenon faced by most nations. Growing old is often accompanied of a loss of close companionship which has been shown may aggravate the cognitive impairment of elders. From a qualitative study, key issues emerged regarding unmet needs of elders communication that we propose to address with Web-based technology. We decided to create an electronic family newspaper to incorporate elders to the current social networks created by their younger relatives who already communicate through Internet applications, such as IM and e-mail. The system uses Web-based technology to make it accessible from any Web browser for those users living abroad. To serve the needs of elders and make the input of information easier, several autonomous agents help the user to interact with the system that can be accessed by any electronic display with a touch screen, such as a tablet PC.

Technology and Aging

Advances in Information Technologies have propelled the development of a diversity of solutions to assist aging. These range from service robots that help older adults perform activities of daily living to monitoring systems for early detection of clinical conditions such as frailty or dementia. The evaluation of these technologies imposes several challenges, due to issues such as the risk inherent in evaluating health outcomes and the nature of emerging technologies that could be unreliable, might be used at unpredictable periods of time, and support implicit interactions, that is, the technology is not at the center of attention of the user, but rather it peripherally supports the task at hand. This chapter describes some of these challenges, exemplified with different assistive technologies and shows how they can be evaluated at different stages of development. In addition, we describe how emerging computing technology can be used to support clinical research on aging. In particular, we show how mobile computing systems can be used to monitor clinical variables and health outcomes in interventions for aging. We illustrate the potential for these technologies with an example of a monitoring platform for mobile phones that can be used to measure parameters associated with frailty, and a videogame that uses a natural user interface to measure muscle strength while the user focuses on playing, and can be used for early detection of sarcopenia.

Technology and Aging: Ubiquitous Sensing Technology for Aging Research

Advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are impacting aging research in multiple ways, ranging from analyzing large volumes of data from longitudinal studies to assessing the efficacy of assistive robots. This chapter focuses on using ubiquitous technologies for gathering behavioral data from individuals to understand how we age, assess the effectiveness of interventions, perform early diagnosis of diseases, or monitor disease progression. The ubiquity of inexpensive sensors, most notably in mobile and wearable devices, and advances in pattern recognition algorithms capable of reliably inferring activities and behavior is providing a new and powerful tool for aging research. We describe how these technologies can be used to monitor clinical variables and health outcomes in interventions for aging and illustrate their use with case studies on assessing frailty, inferring anxiety in caregivers of people with dementia and monitoring eating behaviors. We conclude by discussing some of the issues facing research in this area regarding data quality and privacy.

iFlit: an ambient display to induce cognitive dissonance and behaviour change

In this paper, we explore how persuasive ambient displays could induce cognitive dissonance to promote positive behaviour change among graduate students. We developed iFlit –an interactive and collective ambient display that enables a group of students to reflect on their burnout level, and sleeping and activity habits. iFlit shows a garden with birds representing students monitored behaviour. Birds move according to users’ activity level, and the garden’s background changes according to each user’s sleeping habits. Users match peers perceived burnout, and sleep and activity habits to induce cognitive dissonance. We argue such displays are more efficient than personal devices to empower individuals’ self-reflection due their capabilities for enabling a playful interaction with their personal data.