Katie Siek
A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) official podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. In this episode, Khari Douglas (CCC Senior Program Associate) interviews Dr. Katie Siek, a professor in Informatics and the Chair of Informatics at Indiana University – Bloomington. Dr. Siek is interested in integrating pervasive technologies in health and wellness environments to study how technology affects interventions. Her research interests include human computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and health informatics. In this episode, Katie discusses health informatics, fitness trackers, data ownership, and aging in place. Listen to the episode here.
Below is a transcription from part of the discussion about aging in place. It is lightly edited for readability and the full transcript can be found here.
[Catalyzing Computing Episode 33 – starting at 22:42]
Khari: Another project I know you’re working on, you have an award from the National Science Foundation for Toolkits for Aging in Place for Older Retirees (TAIPOR). So what is aging in place?
Katie: Right. So, aging in place is typically this idea that older adults want to…You know, you’ve been in a community, you want to stay part of the community, and you want to be able to safely engage with it. So the idea is that you can continue living safely and with dignity in your own home or in the place that you see fit — even if it’s a different community, you can live there.
The other thing I recently learned about — I always, in my head thought, when I get older I would go to an older adult community and that’s how it would work; but I’ve actually learned about how expensive this is and how a large part of our population does not have the resources necessary to do this. So living in your home is kind of like the cheapest way to go. There’s the idea of, like, “we want you to live in place safely and with dignity,” and the other part is that, like, maybe you can’t live elsewhere, so how do we help facilitate that?”
Khari: Ok. So what kind of technologies are needed for aging in place? What have you been working on?
Katie: Research in aging has been going on for decades and what I really enjoy seeing is how the research community has, kind of, matured in our understanding of this. Early on we were saying, “Oh, we need to work with older adults and we will go to experts in older adult caregivers.” So in a lot of that research we actually weren’t talking to older adults, it was more about the caregivers and gerontologists and such. It was very much about monitoring people in their home as if people weren’t going to go outside their home.
A lot of it was about safety, like, “Did Mom fall today? Did Dad have any visitors today? Is there anything I have to worry about?” It was very much in the home environment, but then we started looking at these sensors and we started talking to older adults about what they actually want. And the sensors got smaller so we can put them on the body and people can travel in their community. Now I think we’re almost in this third wave to say, “With smart cities and such you can be all around your community and aging in place.”
So what is aging in place technology? It could be everything from your voice assistant, like your Alexa; to the wearable that you’re wearing to see how much you’re walking or who you’re talking with; all the way to those standard sensors in the home to make sure you haven’t fallen and can get help; to your city — there’s a great project at the University of Michigan using wearables to kind of see if the city infrastructure itself is safe for older adults. Do we need curb cuts? Is someone stumbling here? So aging in place technology now is broadening and expanding to also commodity technology and special case technology.
The projected percentage of older adults in the U.S. population is expected to increase over the coming decades, making these aging in place technologies increasingly important. Of note, the recently revealed American Jobs Plan has proposed $400 billion for “home and community-based care for elderly and disabled people.” The aging in place technologies Dr. Siek discusses on the podcast could certainly be part of such investments.
Listen to the full interview with Dr. Siek below or find it on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Blubrry | Google Podcasts | iHeartRadio | Soundcloud | Youtube. If you prefer to read rather than listen, the transcript of the interview is available here.
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