Connected Home & Community
The Connected Home & Community activity is exploring how pervasive computing technologies and experience-centred design methods can be used to support people in their activities of daily living and their relationship with friends and family. Although we consider the impact of such technologies and methods on the whole community, we are particularly interested in older people, people with age-related cognitive and physical impairments, intergenerational communication, and the mental wellbeing of younger people.
Key research challenges include the development of: activity recognition hardware, algorithms and evaluation methods; situated prompting algorithms, architectures and systems, and new experience-centred design methods development and their application. The research is configured in terms of a combination of longer-term high-risk projects, shorter-term lower-risk projects; and technology platform development work to facilitate both our own research and that of the wider community in pervasive computing, design and human-computer interaction.
Activity recognition for everyday living
The use of ICT to provide intelligent and context aware support for older people in their homes depends on being able to unobtrusively recognise the basic actions that people carry out using networks of sensors embedded in the world around them. The recognition of activities, and the manner of performance of activities requires the development of hardware, software architectures, and probabilistic techniques that can reason over heterogeneous sensor data. This remains an open problem for computer science and in SiDE we are concentrating on developing activity recognition approaches using embedded sensors and applying them to activities of daily living.
Situated prompting
Situated prompting is one way of automatically supporting people in their daily lives by providing computer generated prompts to people having difficulty completing an activity, much as a carer of a person with dementia does. We do this by using a combination of activity recognition and reasoning, and psychological models of how people perform complex activities. This requires experts in software and hardware systems, machine learning and psychology to work closely together. To ensure the systems we develop can be deployed in the real world a key requirement is that our models must include descriptions salient details of both the environment and cognitive processes involved, and must be “designer friendly” in the sense that these descriptions can easily be created.
There is a well-understood relationship between social connectedness and quality of life among older and younger people. For older people this relationship is exemplified by the thesis of "successful ageing" advanced by Rowe and Kahn who draw attention to the strength of the relationship between quality of life and the social context within which ageing is experienced. Conversely we know that exclusion, isolation and loneliness compromise quality of life and increase vulnerability. Loneliness and social isolation are also associated with a variety of negative health outcomes including excess mortality, depression and suicide and increased health service use. Although the mechanisms underpinning such relationships are unclear, promoting social engagement at all stages of our lives is an important element in social and health policy in the UK. Our goal is to use experience-centred approaches to explore the depth and texture of social relations and develop new digitally mediated communication media that are sensitive to the complex and variable nature of the different relationships people have.
