At age 77, keeping a routine is important to L. Derly. He incorporates many activities that he knows will help him to continue to age successfully. He uses a coffee maker that sends a wireless signal to his daughter in Japan, indicating that he is up and beginning his daily routine. He checks his email, and the mouse records his heart rate and sends that information to his doctor. After email, he plays a computer game that increases his reaction time, critical to maintaining his ability to drive.

He then sets out on some errands, first setting the house alarm system and alerting the parent company that the house should be empty. Sensors in the floor corroborate this information and also show that he is maintaining a usual routine and nothing is amiss. His GPS system in his car helps him obtain directions, but also can help locate him if he should have any trouble.

While L. Derly is a fictional character, this data-gathering scenario might very well become reality in the not too distant future.

An Indiana University School of Informatics-led team is creating a digital toolkit that enables elders to maintain their privacy, while taking full advantage of home-based computing for their health and personal safety. The project, which is funded by an $821,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), will construct a "living lab" on the Bloomington campus to test initial designs, and will the best designs in the homes of a select group of volunteers at Meadowood Apartments, a Bloomington retirement community.

The project will monitor the routine activities of participants' daily lives, looking for health and lifestyle anomalies that if addressed at an early stage, can be kept from becoming a big problem. An example would be missing meals, or changes in gait that could be indications of medication effects or the early stages of depression.

Initially, the IU researchers will concentrate on designs used to perform these user studies. The feedback from the elder users will enable improvements in both design and methodology. And, privacy will always be a major consideration.

Jean Camp is an associate professor with IU's School of Informatics, and is an expert on privacy issues and how information technology affects individuals and society. Prof. Camp says the project will address how "always on" computing affects privacy in a home-based health care environment. Joining Camp will be assistant informatics professors Kay Connelly and Kalpana Shankar, and Lesa Lorenzen-Huber, assistant professor in the IU School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation.

The team will also consider how information processing can be integrated into everyday devices such as personal digital assistants (PDA), cell phones, pagers and laptop computers — or as in the case of our fictional Mr. Derly, in common household items.

For example, CogniFit is a software program that was chosen by the Wall Street Journal as the best overall buy in improving brain health. Nintendo has a game called "Brain Age" that helps older adults improve their cognitive functioning. Caregivers can benefit from gerotechnology as well.

The researchers say that privacy concerns and elder care is an area that hasn't gotten sufficient attention, and that it will be one of the major thrusts behind the IU project. Connelly emphasizes that privacy must be a paramount concern before any such technology is used.

In the second year of the three-year study, the team will develop a tool for participants to help them and their caregivers articulate their privacy concerns to designers. The final year of the study calls for the design of a home computer monitoring system for two families, who will deploy them at their Meadowood apartments.

Evaluating their interaction over time will allow IU researchers to then create new versions of the framework and tools based on the lessons learned in the first two years.

Another important benefit of the NSF funding grant is that students in the School of Informatics and its Department of Computer Science will have the opportunity to participate in research that is addressing two of the most compelling trends of our time: population aging and the pervasiveness of technology. This grant will help prepare a number of students to create, modify, and use technology to improve the quality of life of our aging population.