Organizational Unit:

Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Technologies to Support Aging-in-Place for People with Long-Term Disabilities

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70667

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 13

Universally Designed mHealth App for Individuals Aging with Multiple Sclerosis

(IARIA, 2018) Ruzic, Ljilja ; Mahajan, Harshal P. ; Sanford, Jon

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) presents with chronic symptoms that share many of the functional limitations associated with aging. Additionally, following the period of five years post-diagnosis a large number of individuals diagnosed with MS experience a major decline in their abilities due to the progression of MS. Consequently, they need to learn how to cope with the functional limitations caused by the disease and in addition to those caused by aging. These individuals have to manage the effects of the disease on their lives every day. mHealth apps provide potential support for disease self-management. However, the number of mobile apps design specifically for individuals with MS is inadequate. Additionally, there is no evidence that utility and usability of these current consumer mobile apps were tested with their target population. This research paper describes the design of the mHealth app MS Assistant, an evidence-based app that provides the daily support and self-management of the disease to individuals aging with MS. It was developed based on the Universal Design Mobile Interface Guidelines, UDMIG v.2.1 and the results of the two previous studies that assessed the health and wellness self-management needs in individuals with MS and tested the usability of current mHealth apps. The paper presents an app refinement based on the suggestions of the expert reviewers who tested the effectiveness of the implementation of the UDMIG v.2.1 in the app design and provided possible recommendations for its redesign.
Utility of a Mobile Route Planning App for People Aging with Disability

(IARIA, 2018) Sanford, Jon ; Melgen, Sarah ; Guhathakurta, Subhrajit ; Zhang, Ge

Mobility is a key contributor to an individual’s community living and participation. As a result, outdoor environmental barriers, such as uneven sidewalks and no curb cuts, play a crucial role in the development of disability and loss of independence among individuals aging with mobility and vision limitations. To compensate, people with disabilities typically plan routes before going out. However, they often lack the appropriate street-level information about the environment to plan routes that meet their abilities and needs for safety and accessibility (e.g., the location of curb cuts and crosswalks). As a result, the real impediment to outdoor mobility is not the actual barriers, but the lack of information about those barriers for route planning. To provide the street-level information about barriers that would maximize the independent living and community participation of people with mobility disabilities, the project team developed a working prototype of the Application for Locational Intelligence and Geospatial Navigation (ALIGN) based on static graphical information systems (GIS) data (e.g., physical infrastructure, slope, crime rates and land uses). This study details the utility testing of the application with individuals aging with mobility and vision limitations by using direct observation, think-aloud and open-ended questionnaires. Findings indicate that participants found the application to be potentially useful, especially in unfamiliar locations. However, testing also indicated a number of refinements, including multimodal input and outputs that would enhance the utility of the initial prototype. Additional design criteria will inform the next prototype, including use of consistent audio/visual feedback, and simpler directions. These criteria will be applied to create a more usable application for the target population.
A Qualitative Approach to Understanding User Needs for Aging with Disability

( 2018) Remillard, Elena T. ; Mitzner, Tracy L. ; Singleton, Jenny L. ; Rogers, Wendy A.

There is a growing population of adults with long-term sensory and mobility impairments who are aging into older adulthood. Little is known about the everyday challenges and accessibility issues experienced by these individuals as they age and acquire age-related declines in addition to a pre-existing impairment. The present paper provides an overview of a large-scale interview study, currently in progress, exploring user needs of older adults with long-term vision, hearing, and mobility impairments. The structured interview is designed to elicit detailed information on task performance challenges across a wide range of daily activities, as well as strategies to manage those challenges. In this paper we provide case-study examples from each of the three impairment groups to convey the potential depth and breadth of insights about user needs among individuals aging with impairments that can be realized through this novel qualitative approach.
An Evaluation of a Telepresence Robot: User Testing Among Older Adults with Mobility Impairment

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-03) Wu, Xian ; Thomas, Rebecca ; Drobina, Emma ; Mitzner, Tracy ; Beer, Jenay

For older adults with mobility impairment, maintaining health and wellness while aging-in-place independently is crucial. Telepresence technology, such as Kubi, can be potentially beneficial for this target population to stay socially connected [1]. However, the Kubi robot is not specifically designed for older adults with mobility impairment. For this target population to adopt the technology successfully, it is important to ensure that they would not experience usability barriers. Thus, we conducted usability testing of Kubi with five older adults with self-reported mobility impairment. The findings indicated both hardware and GUI problematic issues for this population. Hardware problems were primarily related to the base. GUI usability issues were caused by system visibility and control of the robot. These findings provide direction for improving the usability of telepresence robots, particularly for adults aging with mobility impairment.
SmartBathroom: Developing a smart environment to study bathroom transfers

(RESNA, 2017) Jones, Brian D. ; Pandey, Shiva ; Presti, Peter ; Taylor, Russell ; Natarajan, Prasanna ; Mahajan, Shambhavi ; Mahajan, Harshal P. ; Sanford, Jon

Individuals’ functional abilities change over time; they increase and then decrease over the lifespan, and in some they may fluctuate over the course of a day. While these fluctuations may not impact one’s ability to engage in daily activities, they can be problematic for people aging with disability or a progressive chronic condition such as arthritis or multiple sclerosis, particularly when performing toilet or shower/bath transfers. Although various assistive technologies (AT) and environmental modifications are designed to facilitate bathroom transfers, they are static solutions, selected to match an individual’s ability at one point in time rather than providing a dynamic environment that can adapt to support changing abilities. The SmartBathroom Laboratory is being developed as part of the RERC TechSAge as a highly sensed, adjustable residential bathroom environment to accommodate a wide variety of research studies on task performance during bathroom transfers. These studies will focus on identifying the problems faced by people with functional limitations as they age as well as on exploring viable solutions to these problems. In this paper, we describe design and engineering requirements, challenges, and choices in the development of the SmartBathroom Laboratory.
Haptic Simulation for Robot-Assisted Dressing

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017) Yu, Wenhao ; Kapusta, Ariel ; Tan, Jie ; Kemp, Charles C. ; Turk, Greg ; Liu, C. Karen

There is a considerable need for assistive dressing among people with disabilities, and robots have the potential to fulfill this need. However, training such a robot would require extensive trials in order to learn the skills of assistive dressing. Such training would be time-consuming and require considerable effort to recruit participants and conduct trials. In addition, for some cases that might cause injury to the person being dressed, it is impractical and unethical to perform such trials. In this work, we focus on a representative dressing task of pulling the sleeve of a hospital gown onto a person’s arm. We present a system that learns a haptic classifier for the outcome of the task given few (2-3) real-world trials with one person. Our system first optimizes the parameters of a physics simulator using real-world data. Using the optimized simulator, the system then simulates more haptic sensory data with noise models that account for randomness in the experiment. We then train hidden Markov Models (HMMs) on the simulated haptic data. The trained HMMs can then be used to classify and predict the outcome of the assistive dressing task based on haptic signals measured by a real robot’s end effector. This system achieves 92.83% accuracy in classifying the outcome of the robot-assisted dressing task with people not included in simulation optimization. We compare our classifiers to those trained on real-world data. We show that the classifiers from our system can categorize the dressing task outcomes more accurately than classifiers trained on ten times more real data.
Data-Driven Haptic Perception for Robot-Assisted Dressing

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016-08) Kapusta, Ariel ; Yu, Wenhao ; Bhattacharjee, Tapomayukh ; Liu, C. Karen ; Turk, Greg ; Kemp, Charles C.

Dressing is an important activity of daily living (ADL) with which many people require assistance due to impairments. Robots have the potential to provide dressing assistance, but physical interactions between clothing and the human body can be complex and difficult to visually observe. We provide evidence that data-driven haptic perception can be used to infer relationships between clothing and the human body during robot-assisted dressing. We conducted a carefully controlled experiment with 12 human participants during which a robot pulled a hospital gown along the length of each person’s forearm 30 times. This representative task resulted in one of the following three outcomes: the hand missed the opening to the sleeve; the hand or forearm became caught on the sleeve; or the full forearm successfully entered the sleeve. We found that hidden Markov models (HMMs) using only forces measured at the robot’s end effector classified these outcomes with high accuracy. The HMMs’ performance generalized well to participants (98.61% accuracy) and velocities (98.61% accuracy) outside of the training data. They also performed well when we limited the force applied by the robot (95.8% accuracy with a 2N threshold), and could predict the outcome early in the process. Despite the lightweight hospital gown, HMMs that used forces in the direction of gravity substantially outperformed those that did not. The best performing HMMs used forces in the direction of motion and the direction of gravity.
Analysis Of The Effect Of A Rear Wall Grab Bar Configuration On The Fall Risk Associated With Toilet Transfers In Older Adults With Mobility Impairment

(RESNA/NCART, 2016) Sanath, Achyuthkumar A. ; Mahajan, Harshal P. ; Gonzalez, Elena ; Sanford, Jon ; Fain, W. Brad

Twenty-three older adults were recruited for a two-hour in-home study. As a part of the process, the researchers asked questions regarding their process for toilet transfer, asked to provide ratings about toilet transfer in terms of their levels of confidence, difficulty, and how much more challenging it has become with age and with their permission, took photographs of their toilets. The objective of this project is to conduct a secondary analysis of this photographic and interview data to test our hypothesis that the presence of a grab bar on the rear wall prompted older adults to stretch, in order to reach for it across the toilet, consequently increasing the fall risk. The analysis showed us that the presence of a rear wall grab bar, though perceived to ease transfers, might actually prove more challenging to perform transfers with. The rear wall grab bar might only provide an illusion of safety. The results from this analysis may help guide future research undertakings to understand the relationship between a grab bar’s configuration and the risk of falling.
Autobed: Open Hardware for Accessible Web-based Control of an Electric Bed

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016) Grice, Phillip M. ; Chitalia, Yash ; Rich, Megan ; Clever, Henry M. ; Kemp, Charles C.

Individuals with severe motor impairments often have difficulty operating the standard controls of electric beds and so require a caregiver to adjust their position for utility, comfort, or to prevent pressure ulcers. Assistive human-computer interaction devices allow many such individuals to operate a computer and web browser. Here, we present the Autobed, a Wi-Fi-connected device that enables control of an Invacare Full-Electric Homecare Bed, a Medicare-approved device in the US, from any modern web browser, without modification of existing hardware. We detail the design and operation of the Autobed. We also examine its usage by one individual with severe motor impairments and his primary caregiver in their own home, including usage logs from a period of 102 days and detailed questionnaires. Finally, we make the entire system, including hardware design and components, software, and build instructions, available under permissive open-source licenses.
Moving In Out and Around the Home: Solutions from Older Adults with Long-term Mobility Impairment

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-06) Gonzalez, Elena ; Fausset, Cara ; Foster, Amanda ; Cha, Grace ; Fain, W. Brad

The purpose of this study was to explore how older adults aging with long-term mobility impairment have adapted to mobility challenges in the home. Through in-home interviews, participants discussed their experience moving in, out and around their home with regard to challenges, solutions, barriers, and changes with age. This paper provides a characterization of the solutions used by participants to overcome in-home mobility challenges as well as unresolved barriers they faced. These themes illustrate the ingenuity of the participants as well as opportunities to support aging in place via design to better match a person’s environment to his/her capabilities.