Deploying wide-scale in-home assessment technology

Cognitive or motor function decline are major causes of loss of independent living among the aged. Several methods employing ubiquitous or unobtrusive technologies have been proposed for application toward in-home assessment to identify clinically meaningful change. Most attempts at multidimensional home monitoring have been on a limited scale. This has been the result of both technical and clinical research challenges in applying and more importantly testing the efficacy of such methods on a community-wide scale. We designed and implemented a system for application to a community based clinical trial of the efficacy of a basic sensor net (motion and contact sensors, RF location systems, and personal home computer interaction) to be studied in 300 homes of independent seniors. In this manuscript we describe a protocol to ensure several key outcomes: facilitation of recruitment and enrollment, customized training of elders for in-home computer use, optimized sensor net installation, tracking of subject status and linkage to study management software to enable on-line, real-time testing and trouble-shooting with seniors. The methodology suggests that large-scale unobtrusive in-home assessment is feasible for research needed to establish the efficacy of such systems for detection of cognitive decline and related conditions of aging.