Reflecting On Pills And Phone Use: Supporting Awareness Of Functional Abilities For Older Adults

Older adults often struggle with maintaining self-aware of their ability to carry out everyday activities important for independence. Unobtrusive sensors embedded in the home can monitor how older adults interact with objects around the home and can provide objective accounts of behaviors to support self-awareness. In this paper, we describe the design and four month deployment of a prototype sensing system that tracks medication taking and phone use in the homes of two older adults. We describe two case studies on 1) how they engaged with the data by looking for and explaining their own anomalous behaviors and 2) how they used the sensor data to reflect on their actions and their own self-awareness of their abilities to remain independent. Finally, we propose recommendations for the design of home sensing systems that support awareness of functional abilities for older adults using reflection.