Informatics Designs Tools to Promote Health Care, Independent Living
From: Indiana University - 07/19/2007

Researchers at the Indiana University School of Informatics will design tools
that address the privacy concerns of the elderly, as information processing
becomes more integrated in everyday devices around them. They will build a
"living lab," and volunteers from a Bloomington retirement community will
participate in studies and provide feedback on how to improve designs and the
design methodology. The digital toolkit could include a sensor that would be
mounted to the kitchen counter for volunteers to place a finger before making
breakfast, and a sensor embedded in a TV remote control that measures the
participant's heart rate each time it is used. "Our proposal addresses the
acute privacy challenges of using ubiquitous computing in a home-based health
care environment, where vulnerable populations risk enforced technology
intimacy," says associate professor Jean Camp, who specializes in privacy
issues and the impact of IT on society. They will concentrate on developing
tools that will allow the volunteers and their caregivers to communicate
their privacy concerns in the second year of the study, and in the third year
the team will design a ubiquitous computing system for two households at the
retirement community and study the interaction. The National Science
Foundation is funding the project with a $821,000 grant. 

Read the entire article at:
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/6039.html
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/news/news.asp?id=487

Links:
L. Jean Camp
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/people/profiles.asp?u=ljcamp

Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=889444

Privacy in Home-Based Ubicomp
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0705676