Digital Family Portrait Field Trial: Support for Aging in Place

A growing social problem in the U.S., and elsewhere, is enabling older adults to continue living independently, as opposed to moving to an institutional care setting. One key part of this complex problem is providing awareness of senior adults day-to-day activities, promoting "peace of mind" for extended family members. The Digital Family Portrait (DFP) is one approach to providing peace of mind that has shown promise. To date, research on the DFP has been limited to wizard-of-oz based experiments over short periods of time. This paper describes a DFP field trial in which a private home was instrumented with sensors rather than relying on input from wizard-of-oz technology. This field trial was conducted over a period of one year between an aging parent living alone in her own home and her adult child living 50 miles distant. From this field trial we find that even though there was no critical reason for the adult child to be concerned about his mother, all involved parties found utility in the presence of the DFP, even those family members who were not directly involved in the field trial itself.

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