Beyond "ADL""ADL" has a specialized and widely understood definition. Our definition includes anything that can be deduced from the physical movements, and context of an individual. Our apparatus can spot situations of concern arising in daily life. It can be used to provide, or summon timely assistance, saving frustration, resources, and perhaps lives.
We define situation of concern very broadly, ranging from the relatively trivial, yet tiresome to the serious, or life-threatening. We include situations like:
Popular technologies already exist for monitoring exercise goals, or spotting falls, and alerting caregivers.
Our goal is to spot richer, varied situations of concern. We are not targeting subjects with ailments specifically... or the elderly, or their care-givers, or even exercise buffs. Indeed most people will fit each of those profiles at some time in their life. Our platform provides services that are uniquely useful from the first day, and which learn to become more helpful as we age, and as our special needs become apparent. Our vision is not driven by engineering options. It is driven by our desire to extend a powerful assistive technology to the infirm, and elderly, who overwhelmingly want to age in place. As we age, few of us would choose, or find it easy to move from the familiar surroundings of our home, into a care facility. Similarly, few of us relish embracing new and unfamiliar assistive technologies. Surprise! Learning a whole new technology does not get easier with age either. For example, we all need help to find things we mislay sometimes. We all value timely reminders to perform everyday tasks, like taking our medication. But as we age, finding things, and remembering task becomes more tiresome, and we want to know that somebody will come to our aid if we fall down, or experience some other situation where we need help. So one of our goals is to provide a service that we can learn to use, while it's easy for us to learn new things, and which can offer increasingly more tailored support as we evolve, but which doesn't require us to learn new habits, or adapt to a new unfamiliar gizmo. We contend that re-purposing and adapting a familiar, trusted technology - one with at least predictable behavior, becomes increasingly attractive as we age, and our faculties dwindle. Moreover, few of us will gleefully accept disruptive assistive technologies. Neither will we welcome technologies that seem invasive, and leave us wondering if we, or perhaps somebody else, will benefit at our expense. We want to be able to try things out, and see if they work for us, and reject them if they don't. In summary, we prefer to remain the senior controlling partner in our continuing journey.
But what are the compelling services that everyone might sign up for?
Each moment of everyday life provides an opportunity for an automatic activity tracker to provide helpful, timely assistance.
|
Our Research
Subpages (1):
ADL Tracker - TS05b