CHS: Small: Collaborative Research:Toolkits for Aging in Place for Older Retirees (TAIPOR)

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Many older people want to live in their homes for as long as possible. Much computer and sensor-based technology is being developed and deployed to support aging in place, ranging from fall sensors to complicated systems that monitor all of a user's activities and provide reminders, warnings, and alerts to family and caregivers. However, by and large such technology has been designed by engineers rather than the end users. As a result, adoption and acceptance of these systems by older adults is low. The project will begin with studies and focus groups of retired adults to determine the kinds of technological support elders actually want in their homes. Next, the project will create an easy to use "toolkit" that will enable an elder to create and customize a system to use in her own home. Finally, the project will create training materials to help ordinary people learn to design these technologies. As a result, this project will lead to the development aging in place systems that better meet the needs of elders and find more widespread acceptance. In addition, project will bring together people of all ages to engage in intergenerational design, including a workshop where Girl Scouts will collaborate with their grandparents to learn about each others technology needs and utilize the toolkit. The project, TAIPOR, builds on sociotechnical research in personal informatics that engages underserved populations in making their own customized technologies for tailored personal use and identifies perceptions related to adoption and abandonment of pervasive computing technologies by the people who live with them. TAIPOR research can be abstracted into three areas: (i) Identify Perceptions related to Adoption and Abandonment of IoT through contextual, qualitative studies where older retirees document their experiences with aging in place technologies. Investigators will develop a set of design guidelines and highlight exemplar IoT that meet older retiree needs. (ii) Design a Toolkit to Create and Customize IoT by novice, older retirees with minimal training. Based on the design guidelines, the investigators will develop a toolkit that abstracts the functionality of the exemplar IoT to enable older retirees to create their own aging in place technologies. (iii) Develop Scaffolded Training Materials so that older retirees can develop their own technologies with limited researcher intervention. Design workshops have arisen as a way to involve the end user in the design of technologies, but require significant resources on the part of researchers and are not scaleable. The investigators will disseminate a set of best practices for how to teach older retirees, an underserved population, about making at scale.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.