I-Living, the Assisted Living Project

The aging of baby boomers has become a social and economical challenge. According to MIT's magazine TECHNOLOGY REVIEW, July/August 2003, "In the United States alone, the number of people over age 65 is expected to hit 70 million by 2030, doubling from 35 million in 2000, and similar increases are expected worldwide". Along with the increase of population of elderly people, the expenditures of the United States for health-care will grow projecting to rise to 15.9% of the GDP ($2.6 trillion) by 2010 (Digital 4Sight's Healthcare Industry Study). Unless the cost of senior care can be significantly reduced by technological means, it could bankrupt the already shaky social security and medicare systems.

Our project aims to design, implement, and evaluate (i) an assisted-living supportive software infrastructure that allows disparate technologies, software components, and wireless devices of different protocol families to work together in a low cost, dependable, and secure fashion with predictable properties; (ii) interface that abstracts this software infrastructure and provides various services to facilitate elder people with their independent and/or assisted living. Specifically, we are carrying out R&D tasks to achieve the following aims:

(A1) We are developing a dependable, robust, plug-and-play infrastructure that coordinates layers of sensing, localization, communication, and event/data management in a dependable and evolvable way.

(A2) We are developing QoS annotation and analysis technologies that make QoS assumptions explicit and machine checkable during admission control of various components/devices. This will allow COTS components (developed by diverse programming teams and vendors) to be seamlessly incorporated into the software infrastructure.

(A3) We are developing a rigorous framework for interoperability and its corresponding security architecture to support security and privacy in a wide range of operational context. In particular, we are developing role-based access control and workflow modeling techniques.

(A4) We are building into the software infrastructure a QoS manager to handle the surges of workload and to adjust QoS settings of difference services, with the objective of maximizing the overall utility.

(A5) We are establishing in the assisted living environment a pervasive network of small, inexpensive, low-power devices that integrate off-the-shelf RFID readers/tags, sensors, and actuators with limited on-board processing and wireless communications capabilities. We are devising, with consideration of backward compatibility, robust software solutions to mitigate interference among, and allow co-existence of, wireless-enabled devices that belong to disparate protocol families but operate in the industrial, science, and medical (ISM) frequency bands.

(A6) To realize an easy-to-use, safe, and error-accommodating environment for technology na•ve users, we are designing Human Computer Interaction (HCI) components that address (i) how directed and ambient information, reminders and alerts should be presented to users and (ii) to what extent users can control the degree of information disclosure. We will incorporate social translucency into the system that allows control of the flow and access of their information.

(A7) We will conduct a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the system. The quantitative evaluation compares successful reminders/instructions sent to users and whether or not, and how, they respond to these signals. The qualitative component evaluates the overall experience of the open environment. Through immersed observation, resident interviews, and surveys, we will evaluate how users perceive the system in terms of trust, usefulness, efficiency, and privacy.

With the activities currently carried out, we will be able to build a truly open, secure, and dependable software infrastructure that can be widely deployed with low cost; and to understand whether or not, and to what extent, such a software infrastructure will facilitate elder people who are capable of living independently with modest assistance.