Live Smart: Learn About Smart Home Technologies

okay well welcome to a new session of derotes Living Well digitally series these are events for older adults to learn the what and how of technology that can enrich or improve our lives I'm Lorraine Novak one of today's moderators we're so glad that you could join us today today's event is live smart learning about Smart Home Technology and we'll be focusing on the McKechnie Family Life home research facility in the University of Illinois Urbana campaign we are going to introduce you to our panelists in a few minutes uh but first i'm going to turn this over to my cat my colleague Catherine Bravo who's going to explain today's format Catherine hi everyone I'm my name is Catherine so today we will be covering some exciting smart home Technologies uh some of these are being researched and carried out at the McKechnie Family Life home and we will see a live demonstration of a telepresence robot so before each topic we will start with a quick polling question and then after covering each topic we will take a few questions from the chat before moving on to the next topic um so unfortunately we won't be able to answer every question but if you do put a question in the chat that is not answered today you will receive an answer from our panelist when we send a q a document after this program so you'll receive an email from me um and you can also reach out about getting involved in our Tech coaching program um by contacting me directly so I'm putting the contact information for this in the chat um that way you can reach out to me if you are interested in Tech coaching you will now hear from my colleague Lily um about the use of the chat function to ask your questions and the closed captioning function on Zoom hello everyone I'm Lily welcome we invite you to use the chat function to share any questions thoughts or comments during the program to send a question click on the word icon with the word chat below it could be on the top or bottom of your screen depending on your device click on chat type your message press enter or the return key to send the message to the group please try to ask questions that can be applied to the broader group rather than to your specific specific accounts and we will review the questions and pose as many as possible as Catherine mentioned please be patient and excuse us if there's not enough time to get to all of the questions we will be sending out a q a sheet afterwards we also invite you to use closed captions during this meeting to turn on the closed captions you will click the symbol that has two C's if you don't see that at the bottom or top of your screen there's a more button with three dots if you click more there should be a spot that says show subtitle if you click show subtitle the live transcript of the meeting will be showing on your screen so please send any questions in the chat and now you will hear from Lorraine to introduce our wonderful panelists yeah thanks Catherine thanks Lily um so today we're going to be introducing um two of our panelists who are colleagues with one another Wendy Rogers is the director of The mccutchney Life Family Life home and human factors and aging laboratory she's been conducting research for 30 years with older adults to improve their quality of life joining her is Samuel olanji he is a research fellow also at the McKechnie Family Life home and at the human factors and aging laboratory he conducts research in robotics and smart home technology to support older adults so I'm now going to turn this over to the two of them and we're going to begin with our first polling question good morning everybody my name is Wendy Rogers we're happy to be here with you this morning um Samuel is going to share his slides can you see them okay we have to stop screen share first okay all right I just stopped sharing so you can go ahead and check right excellent okay so what we would like to do is start with a really General overview of what smart home technology is and then provide some examples and to do that we're going to start with our very first poll question so Catherine if you wouldn't mind sharing the poll question for everyone so our first question which everyone should be able to see on their screen is do you have any smart home Technologies in your home uh you can choose yes no or I don't know so just click on the appropriate Circle next to your response on your screen and we'll be able to see everybody's um answers in a few moments foreign we're not seeing the responses on the screen I'm not sure if you're able now there they are okay great so about 43 of people are saying yes that they do have a smart technology in their home about 43 saying no and about 13 saying they aren't sure interesting very mixed group here which is great um we're hoping to show you a range of different kinds of Smart Technologies and we're going to start by thinking about a particular scenario when might I want to use Smart Home Technology so imagine you're getting ready to cook for your friend who's coming to visit you're not sure what you have on hand so you ask your refrigerator what do I have in the fridge it shows you what you have in your refrigerator and what you see gives you an idea of something you can make you ask the refrigerator to show you the recipe for vegetable lasagna why are you going through the recipe you give commands to the oven please preheat and then you start up the coffee machine by telling the coffee machine to start while you're waiting for your food to cook you ask the smart TV to play a show for you after your cooking is done you give the commands to turn off the oven so that's the scenario and now Samuel is going to show you how that might work here in the mckechney Family Life home all right so we're going to have a video demonstration showing that all this that you just saw can happen and it's really happening here at the mechanic feminine life home so this was a live recording we had just a few weeks back of a friend who came to life home and this is what she experienced in the kitchen can you hear the sound thank you no we cannot hear it oh we can't hear the sound that was on me we need to stop sharing and re-share for a moment give us a moment thank you you need to escape out of them there might be a check box to check um that yeah yeah so now share there should be an option at the bottom share the sound bottom left over here over here okay now you're ready we each have our own Mouse we're coordinating all right we'll try that again 10 years it's even Anonymous meeting someone who had some 8 PM for dinner let me see what I have in my fridge and what can I make hey Bixby what's in my fridge hey Bixby show me the recipe for vegetable lasagna here are some recipes for vegetable lasagna hey Bixby select the first one here's how to make slow cooker vegetable lasagna hey Bixby show me the ingredients here are the ingredients you'll need okay I think I should start some creating my oven hey Alexa free it's the range okay at what temperature 425 degrees preheating rage to 425 degrees Fahrenheit for convection making that's good hey Alex down microwave the food in the oven for 30 seconds microwaving for 30 seconds hey Alexa turn on the coffee machine okay [Music] [Music] okay Alexa switch to Netflix hey Alexa turn off the coffee machine okay all right so what you just saw right there was a live recording at the living room and kitchen of the mechanic Family Life home and all of what you saw controlled are all smart devices which are part of the Smart Home Technology we have here at the mechanic Family Life home is it a smart fridge which you could control you know five boys and that's current you see on the fridge can actually be controlled as a smart tablet and you could actually have a control of that fridge from anywhere remotely from your phone or a tablet like if you're in a grocery store and you forgot what is in your fridge you could literally just ask through your phone what's in my fridge and it will show you all that you have there you could ask for different recipes to be prepared you're going to ask for the microwave you know or even the range to be preheated before you arrive home so all of that is available through smart technology that we have at the Academy Family Life home you also have the living area where I pointed to a few things you have the smart TV which you saw that you could control my voice you also have you also have the smart door even though that demonstration wasn't there but right from your phone or through a voice command you could literally check the door if it's closed or open or just put the lock on the door for a certain time and you also have that small robot you saw there was a social robot I remember when she came she came in really stressed that day and just sitting there and rubbing the head of that robot just gave her a therapeutic experience it's a lot more to be experienced like an iPhone when you come here and of course you saw some smart lighting which comes on whenever you're around the living area so these are some of the examples of the smart technology you have here I just wanted you to know that even your own home can be made smarter the heating the lightning the visual communication even the security of the home can be made smarter you need to have an internet control you need to have applications that connect all of these devices which makes it easy to control either from your phone or via voice and all of this we have at the mechanic Family Life home going from Human and computer interfaces to even telemedicine that we will talk more about as we go on in this session and other smart home sensors and wearables that just makes it easier to live autonomous life in a smart home so that's what we have in here and we're glad you're getting to see demonstrations of that wonderful so there are a few questions in the chat that video was really interesting um one of the first questions that I thought was something that was useful is um for example when the woman was asking the fridge for recipes um and they were finding things probably from the Internet is there a way to program and put in your own recipes into the technology on the fridge um is there like an app that people can go into that kind of thing absolutely in fact it's quite interesting that the fridge automatically takes a record of everything you have in your fridge and can actually search on the internet to see recipes that can work with the ingredients you have in your fridge to casually program the robot to your own specific kind of recipes I'm from Nigeria for example and be nice to have some Nigerian dishes being searched online and just suggested to me along the week so all of that can be done on this package so you could add in your own recipes exactly that's wonderful that's really cool to be able to find your own recipes just by using your voice yes um I also see a question about what was the the device that she was touching over by when she was by the TV did it talk about that oh yeah we'll go into it probably too okay so that's a social robot it's a tabletop robot that's about the size you see that in real life and it's supposed to help with social interaction in the home even though she didn't get to talk to it much but actually it can do more than that it can actually recognize your face you get into the room it gives you the feeling of a press of of interaction by turning to you interacting with you via voice and it also has a touch screen by which you could do some other control some fun things with it will tell you a joke you could play games on it so it's a lot more for social interaction but as I mentioned she got in there and it was just it gives a tile feedback when you touch his head like pouring like a like a cat and just makes that interaction so real so that's an example of a social robot to have that we have much more in the mechanic Family Life home but I won't go into that right now not to fake okay all right and then I'll just ask one more question before we move on um someone's asking about a Smart Lock on your door um is that kind of the safety around that is it easy for people to hack the technology um for that kind of system or is it more safe than a regular lock good question so I had in front of me I didn't have time to demonstrate that the smart technology app which you could have the Smart Lock app which you have on your phone so you could have no control of that from your phone you could give even voice control to lock or control the door but in general since it's on your phone the the smart technology is being used in the Smart Hub of the home so you could check from time to be sure that it's not hacked there are usually um I would say security devices and security apps that are connected with all of these devices so that is not hacked by an intruder somewhere out there so usually you have um uh uh I would say applications that are connected with the smart technology you have in your home which will just prevent intruding or hacking from Outsider usually foreign so it sounds like we'll hear maybe a little bit more of this kind of thing later um a reminder to everyone keep sending in your questions I see there's already more we'll get to them um the next round so Samuel please continue wonderful thank you for your engagement I'm annoying to give a specific Healthcare scenarios so Catherine if you wouldn't mind launching that so the question here is would you like to have a robot in your home that your health care provider controls so think about that how might a robot in your home be useful but your health care provider is controlling the robot we'll give you a moment to think yes no or not sure it's fun to watch the results come in it's like a race you know between the yes the no the not sure is winning right now looks like our responses have slowed down so maybe we can share responses great and the winner is not sure so perhaps after we've demonstrated how this might work that might influence your opinion a little bit so let us move on to the next scenario so now I want you to imagine that you are at home recovering from foot surgery and your surgeon wants to check your progress every day for two weeks she wants to review the wound recovery at the incision site and your range of motion so she wants to be monitoring you every day well rather than have you have to go to the office every day she delivers a Telehealth robot to your home for the checkup so imagine you've had foot surgery you don't want to have to go out and go to the office every day so she brings a Telehealth robot to your home that she will be able to use to do the checkup and so Samuel is going to show you how that might work okay so we had a research going where we had a Telehealth robots in one of the rooms here at the mechanic Family Life home I'm going to show you a video demonstration of how that was used to check up someone who had well the demonstration of a foot surgery and recovering from the surgery so that's the robot you see here can you also the screen and that is someone who is supposedly recovering from a foot surgery so we have the robot do a checkup so this robot which you see right here is being this next example shows the soft robotic arm camera zooming into a Band-Aid or womb of a patient that is lying down yeah okay so um I'm going to start it again so you can all hear me okay all here okay so so that's the robot that is being controlled by a tele Health practitioner a doctor or a nurse that is remotely located far away from the robot and what you see here is the tip of the camera and that's a robot that is checking up the ankle that is that is healing up at this time so that was a live demonstration from from the bedroom of one of um on one of the bedrooms in the mechanic Family Life home and I'll share another demonstration in the living room that is the robots and that is the arm of the robot this seat is the camera of the robot and the person is now sitting down and the robot needs to check the person but because he's sitting on a chair the robot needs to go around the chair but it's so designed that the end effector of the robot which is like the upper end of the robot is a soft it's made of a soft material that can go around obstacles so that's what you're going to watch next this video demonstrates the flexibility of the soft robotic arm to maneuver around environmental objects such as bending around a chair foreign okay so what you just saw right there is a working prototype and the doctor or the healthcare practitioner is in a remote location and can see through the camera of the robot all that is happening in the room and that incision point that he or she wants to check up so that's one of the research you know um going on here at the mechanic Family Life home and it's aim to ensure that we design assistive robots that can be used in Telehealth applications like that because Wendy said earlier you know you want to minimize trips to the doctor's office and it also provides effective and Immediate Care without in-person visit particularly if you're healing from a wound you don't have to be you know commuting back and forth the doctors place anytime they need to check so the doctor as part of your welfare package drops that robot with you and they can check you of any time you want that done so that's the robot and that's the camera tip that will give to Dr veeam of wherever the doctor needs to check so we have all the research going on at the Academy Family Life home we have one of the rooms where we have an electric fireplace where currently we're exploring the potential of using the electrified place to see how that affects the overall move the mental states of people who are in that room and that is an ongoing collaboration between an industry and a faculty member at the University of Illinois right here and we also have another project going on there which is called the way filing project it's a project where we're trying to design a robot to assist those with visual impairment so we're in that process where we're trying to understand the needs of these people and how feedback from those people will inform the design of these robots to ensure that it really meets their need of helping them navigate inside the environment they're in so uh this is just a quick view of the Cockney Family Life home this is a research space we have here where home simulation happens and we're going to show you more of that very soon we have collaborations between faculty at the University and faculty you know in all the universities as well as industry partners and of course we also have community outreach going on in this space so you see most of what we have in here in a minute when we show you more through the credit president before we go to questions I want to just highlight one thing about the telepresence robot so this is not I mean the um the soft robot this is not a commercially available robot this is a research prototype so when you look at this you might say wow that looks rather industrial I'm not sure I'd want that in my home and so what we're doing right now is really just testing out with our engineering colleagues the functionality of the robot and working with Healthcare Providers to interview them about what would they need the robot to do how precise would the camera need to be how flexible would the camera need to be and the Physicians we've interacted with are very excited about the potential for using this kind of robot to check up on their patients a variety of different types of patients different types of needs then we would once we get the function working then we would focus on what should it actually look like what would you want to be in your home for an extended period of time so focusing more on the function here and not so much on the form factor and the appearance and now we can take we have time for questions great there are a bunch of questions so I'm gonna try now going to ask as many as I can um so one of the questions that came kind of before you started presenting this this section but kind of goes generally with everything is how many years do you think it would take for most of this kind of technology to appear in homes um maybe starting with just like the kitchen and the the voice control parts and then moving on to the robots okay so currently we have a lot of those smart appliances I showed you in the home environment we already have them in the market like literally you could get a smart fridge like that for between two thousand and five thousand dollars of course you could have even some more expensive than that but in general you could get within that range you could have a smart TV uh smart microwave or a smart dishwasher all of that is in the market right now and you may just need some um technical person to help you connect it all in the home or such that you can control it from a central device from a phone like I showed you just now but all of that is available in the market regarding the risk yeah okay but it's it is still fairly expensive so that does limit the accessibility but some of the devices are less expensive like the Smart Lock on the front door that's a safety feature that's relatively inexpensive and you might just have that smart technology you don't have to have everything but in the first round of what we've shown you everything is commercially available you could buy it today if you wanted to go ahead I'm just also going to add that what you have for example as a smart as a microwave the smart microwave that you saw there is available for almost close to the price of an average microwave it's just that you now have on that just a an inclusion of Wi-Fi connectivity so they may not even advertise that is smart microwave but if you have Wi-Fi connected to this device or your or your washing machine as an example you could now have this connected to the Smart Hub of the home and then it will control it via voice or through your phone I would also want to mention that research robots you saw as when you mentioned they're not yet on the market but we're in that process of going through okay what are the needs of people how do we improve on this and then talk to those that would operate these robots like doctors other Healthcare practitioners to see okay what are the peculiarities they want on robots are the functionalities the ones on the robot and then that over time over the coming years now improves what we currently have we have some telepresence robots in the market but they can't do as much as we want them to do right now and that's the beauty of the penny Family Life home you're living in a future you know environment so we're thinking of okay what will happen in the next five ten years and then you have some of these robots being you know doing some of these things that we're demonstrating right there so we're literally looking at the future in some of these robots here wow so I guess what you're saying is um a lot of these devices are not very different than the regular non-smart I guess devices that we have in our homes but they kind of just need that Wi-Fi connectivity um to make it smart and give it um exactly okay so kind of going along with that um talking more about the robot side of things are there other types of technology or electrical equipment that people would need in their homes for all of these devices to work um especially the robots if it's different than just Wi-Fi for the robots I would say that you need a good Wi-Fi connection but uh the main Hardware you need that is the robot itself of course and usually you have applications that come with the robot that you can connect with Android devices or whatever you know application you want to use with it later on your laptop or on your tablet usually there's a connection between the robot and the device you're going to be using to control it right now we have uh developments in the robot control that connects with your web application so the trade can open up the control of the robots from a web browser on your phone or on the laptop so that makes it a platform independent whether you say a Mac or using just a phone you can easily control it but I would say that a lot of these things are still under development particularly robotic Technologies in our homes Telehealth application that robots can perform all of these things a lot of these things are still still in development some of them are in the market right now but I wouldn't guarantee that they would do a lot of what we should right now because you wouldn't have to add a lot of technology to your home so with Samuel's things if you have a good Wi-Fi connection and a smartphone that's all you need so we don't have to come in and retrofit your home and add a lot of Technology infrastructure that's really a big advancement that we've seen in the last 10 years or so yeah great um and so I guess along the lines of the Telehealth robot there's just some questions in general since I know it's not um accessible just yet but kind of the function of it um it wouldn't be living with a person temporarily I mean um permanently it would be a temporary sort of situation kind of how would a how would a doctor's appointment work with the robot would it be delivered to you and then the doctor controls it could you just go over that a little bit that's exactly right the way you've described it so the way thinking about it is if you get um released from the hospital you've had your surgery they would the next day they would deliver the robot to your home and the robot would be with you for the six weeks during your recovery and it would be part of your insurance and it would be covered and so when you have the appointment with your health care provider much like on a Telehealth visit you turn on your laptop and turn on the video you would just enable access for them to use the robot and then during that visit they would control the robot and be able to check up on you in your home after the six weeks you're recovered we take that robot and we put it to the next patient's home that they need it for the next six weeks wow I understand okay so it's it's not as much of a social um type of robot it's more functional and just to uh communicate with doctors and show images of what's going on in your home that's right it's very much a health care tool now in the future I could Envision that you have a robot that's in your home all the time and could do multiple things but right now we're focused on that robot is a Telehealth robot that will have to have certain characteristics to be used in a healthcare context other robots were working with like Samuel showed you the Jibo are more social and that would live in your home with you all the time that would be your robot in your home in your living room that's great I'm I'm seeing some positive uh comments about the healthcare robot seeing it's it's part of the future and it could be uh really helpful for people who are trying to heal at home um I think we'll do one more question and then we'll go back to the last part of the presentation um and kind of relating to to what's going to happen in the next part where we see a lot more of just the smart home um is there are there companies that will come and help people train people on Smart Home Technology when they're being installed how do people learn how to use their technology interesting so um a lot of uh I would say electronic uh shops out there and those developing these gadgets usually they have a good uh support units that can help with the installation of these Technologies I would say that as an example if you have um a smart fridge and you want it connected with the smart home hub you already have or you just want to install you could literally talk to the support Personnel at some of these stores and they are happy to it's usually part of the package where they can come and help you install and also if you don't even have that and you have an I.T person who is vast with you know connecting devices to to to to the Wi-Fi technology you have in your home I think that should also be fine they should be able to get it all to the up what is what has happened in recent years right now is an expansion in the the The Versatile nature of of the connectivity between devices and a smart home which is now you know part of either Google or Amazon products they have this Hub with which they can allow easy connection of appliances they just bought it new or you haven't applies in the house that has Wi-Fi connectivity I don't know how to connect it with it they now have good support framework they have good support Personnel that you literally can just Google or ask them for it and you have someone in a nearby electronic shop that can actually walk into your home and help you connect this so connecting to it is better right now so here's a good example of Samuel the engineer Wendy not the engineer so Samuel thinks oh it's relatively easy their support I just call I just connect I do this I do not believe I could do all of that and so it's important to think about that yes there are all the things that Samuel talked about but a lot of them are not developed for Less tech savvy people for older dolls for people who live alone and so for some of our projects we focus specifically on designing the instructional support materials so we have one project that's called digital assistance in a box where we have the Amazon Alexa we have the smart plugs we have Quick Start guides we've programmed everything for you we send it to you you open the box you literally plug it in and it works so I think there does need to be more support for people to be able to do that who may not have that stronger background yeah and I think that should actually that we should have more of that for the devices we have around here we just talked about the Amazon Alexa and for all of the other devices we have I think we would need more of that kind of instructional support tool that just comes as a package with it which is now currently being developed in several research like what only just talked about I think that's really helpful both of your perspectives because there's a wide range of people who will be using these Technologies or who already are so um I appreciate both of your perspectives and I think we can go ahead and move on to the next section and we'll do some more questions at the end great thank you wonderful questions of Engagement so for our third example um we're going to talk about a telepresence and so we'll start with another poll question and the idea is visiting far away friends from inside your home would you like to be able to use a telepresence technology and here the options are yes no and I don't know what that is so a telepresence technology that would enable you to visit your friends without leaving your home will give you time to think about that here the yeses are winning so far yes foreign I love the open-mindedness about this idea so the vast majority of you like this idea and want to try it and that's super exciting and so we're going to show you what that looks like and the scenario here is to think about your friend is having a birthday party and you're not able to travel because you just had foot surgery but your friend has a telepresence robot in his own home that's called the Omni that he invites you to use so you can still join the party and participate in that party so what we're going to do now is Samuel is going to do a live demonstration he'll first give you an overview of the robot and then he'll show you how it works okay so we're going to give you a live demonstration as Wendy said of authentic presidential robots which lives here at the mechanic Family Life home and we're gonna take it around the home but before we do that I just want to give you an idea what the robot looks like so that's what you see right now and you have a robot which has a screen where the person in the environment the robot can get to see you and it has a speaker and a mic and it's gonna move around as you see on the mobile base so how does this work you have the robots in the house of your friend who is having the party and you have internet by which you sitting in your living room or in the bedroom have your laptop on you can just view what's happening around there and you can communicate with them so what you have here is the screen that you'll be seeing on through your own laptop or through your own device a screen through which you would see the environment so you would see for example this is the living room that I took from the I Through The Eyes of the robot if I would call it that and over here you see the base of the robot so that you don't run into anything that you begin to control the robot and then of course you see the environment there's some controls for the mic for the camera whatever you want to do just to you know make it easier and as I said you're looking at all of this from your laptop so and then of course you have other controls down here so right now I'm going to be logging into the robots and taking you on a tour of the life home all you need is just a device that can connect with internet you don't need to install the special application you don't need a special Android application you just need a computer that has access to Internet and you can browse on it so we're going to give you a link like this and you're going to click on the link so once you click on the link it takes you into the robot to see what the robot is seeing So currently every one of our systems yeah thanks thank you so currently right now you are more or less inside robot seeing Through The Eyes of the robot and this is the health technology lab of the mechanic Family Life home and we're going to be starting the tour from here so I'm going to be taking you live through the academy Family Life home right now just controlling from my own computer here so here we go [Music] right so um so this is me moving the robot around and using the arrow keys on his keyboard using the arrow keys on my keyboard and just taking the tour of the Lipo so what you have right here is the health technology lab as I said this is a lab that is open to you know all you know disciplines who want to come here and just develop different applications different Healthcare applications that's why you see whiteboards around for brainstorming we could hold hackathons here we have a 3D printer did I show you that okay so it's just by the right there you move on to a place that we're now developing to become a VR space a virtual reality space actually making it an extended reality space yeah so what you see here as I'm entering into the space you can see at the upper right upper left hand corner here the base of the robot so those are the wheels of the robot just to ensure that you're not running into anything for example as I'm walking through this door you could see that the robot is going through like the center of the door so you don't run into the edge of the door so that gives a live view of what the robots the environment of the robot you actually see here a quick you know view of another robot we have which is the stretch robot we can show you much of the demonstration of that right now because of time but and then as I mentioned this room is going to become an extended reality lab which is uh going to be that that means this room is going to change soon and you have here the virtual reality devices that we actually tried that yesterday and it worked well this is also one of our robots called the Macy robot and this is the robot that we use for a lot of communication and you know conversations it's more like a social robot like you saw earlier in the living area and um we have over here the entrance to the home simulation lab so you can see me watching this space here to ensure that if I have to go through that door I will not hit the edge of the door so I look in through the door and here's our home simulation space so you have in here the bathroom the lights are not on but that's fine so that's what the space you saw in the demonstration you can see the smart fridge you can see the microwave you can see the smart coffee machine the smart uh dishwasher here you can even see Amazon here Amazon Alexa device that we have that is the living area and this is the dining room where you have a smart projector which is an interactive projector that you can actually Point any surface it projects to into an interactive surface so it doesn't just be called a display it also is interactive such that you could play a game on it you could turn into a piano almost every application you could do on your phone you could like briefly just bring it out to the table and if you just tap on the table and it works really well so that is the living area that we're looking at as a smart TV and the social robot you saw the other time by The Edge there and so we're moving on to yeah maybe so when he's going to go in there right now and show you how the interactive projector works so uh just give us a minute I'm just gonna step back a bit so you see the interactive projector it's quite interesting actually you get to yeah that's Wendy hey all right so you're right here here yeah you can talk to us excellent yeah welcome to the mckekny family life um come on to info follow me okay coming in I just go so show us more come on in here and see the room with the fireplace at Sandy Woods describing earlier you can poke poke your head in there and see what that looks like wow I'm eager oh so this is our fireplace room and as you can see I'll just step in there and you can see literally an electric fireplace oh you ran into the sofa here but it's such a light robot as you see we can literally just control so that's the electric fire that you see born in there it's not light it's not an actual fire but it's a electric fire that gives you a feeling of I chose the fire gone in the house so uh and just warms up the room changes the atmosphere of the room changes the mood of the room a lot of research is going on regarding that so I'm just going to step outside right now as uh Wendy shows us more of what is happening in that space it's also a chance to meet our friend harshall who just popped in so this is Dr harshal mahadlan he's the assistant director of research for the lifelong hello all right thank you when you want to show us more the last room is our other bedroom where we have some art Technologies in here we have a smart sensor on the bed we have a smart pillow where you can play podcasts while you're laying in bed so I'm gonna just pop in there see what it looks like as uh also sensors on the bed that gets to check your sleeping pattern over time checking your vital signs as you need it and recording all of that if you need that record at any point in time right so I'm just gonna step out okay when do you want to show us more and this way this is our you're going backwards Samuel so he's controlling all of this just using the keys and his Mouse on the computer so this is our observation room if we want to be able to watch people interacting with technology so we can see them they can't see us so this is a one-way mirror as you see here you're able to see the live view of the living room but they can see you all right okay so yeah we can see Marshall out there okay so now we're gonna catch around the house is just a big circle we better move on so we can answer any different questions that people have Samuel so do you want to start here and we'll answer questions I think everybody's seen the main part of the life home okay okay yeah nice thank you that was fun all right so we're looking at all the rooms uh this I'll just mention quickly is the remote access room where we get to test as you see here just by the corner here you get to test a lot of um remote access applications like Telehealth daily nursing tasks and all of that we get to test from this room why the robot is in a different location so we're just going to turn down the volume and stuff okay so we're going to stop here so you can all like ask questions and we responded questions as we wrap up this section that was super cool thank you so much for giving us that tour um there are some questions about the safety with all these Smart Technologies um I guess first first part of that question is on the Privacy side of things um I know people have concerns about the information that for example like an Amazon Alexa would would record about you so what kind of um what kind of privacy caveats I guess are there with um smart technology or Pros okay so uh the link through which I log into this robot is a secure link that comes with the robots it comes as a package with a robot so it's monitored by the robot team those who develop the robot which is the only company and it's secure and that's why they call it secure link is available only to you except to those you share it with so it's not an application that can easily be hacked it literally has security protocols attached with that link and alongside all the appliances that we showed you it's as I mentioned all of them can be controlled from your phone they are literally anti-viral anti-malware device applications that come with these devices that you can monitor from your phone to know if there's anything going on or anything fishy that is that that that needs to be checked you can literally see the status of what is happening for all of these devices from your phone so all of that is secure so all right so I'm gonna stop sharing right now sure other part of the safety question is about the physical safety um with any sort of Technology um any emissions or radiation or anything that's been studied about um these Technologies having an effect on a person after being together for a long time being in the same space it's a good question and I don't think I don't think so actually a lot of these things emits very minimal you know radiation and the truth is that it it emits just about the same kind of radiation which is unhandful that every other like device you have around like your laptop or every other device that connects to the to the network that minimal on harmful amount of radiation so it's not it's not going to affect anyone in any way and it's just the basic thing that most of the devices that have connections Wi-Fi have so no harmful or you know any risk about that there are no risk to having that in the home with you great that's good to know um I'll ask one more question and then I think we'll have um a few more things from Catherine and Lorraine but um one last question is kind of about how how quickly how soon can we expect some things like the health technology being available and safe to use in homes um for people who are aging right now or we're all aging but people who are older adults and want some sort of Technology now or soon so you know also the telepresence robot that we just demonstrated is commercially available as well right now that anybody can buy that so a lot of this technology is already available um the some of the work that we're doing on the newer robots that we're designing it'll just be a couple of years before those will be available either in individual homes or in Continuing Care retirement communities where maybe you could it would be more affordable to buy one robot that would serve multiple people but a lot of these things already are available and then one of the things we're trying to do in our own research is to figure out how can we use these Technologies to support health so for example the Misti robot that um Samuel showed you that's already available and we're doing a study right now where that robot is being used to interact with older adults for um just assessing their health on a daily basis so in the morning how are you today how are you feeling how did you sleep last night just getting some general information in a socially interactive way so we're trying to take the technology that's available and figure out ways to use it to support Health Care that's great so I think um what I'm hearing is people can start finding ways to incorporate this in their home now and more will probably be available as as more research is done exactly well thank you so much for that amazing presentation and um walk through the the life home and I think Catherine has a few little announcements or Lorraine before we go uh yes give me one second I'm gonna share um a slide about an opportunity that we have yay so you heard about a lot about robots as we were going around with the live phone right now so the tele helped robots you saw the social robots you saw another robot right there called stretch you probably want to know more about how we can use this robot system but all the adults at home so we have an amazing opportunity happening in the human robot interaction class it's a class for uh undergraduate students and also Master students in community health and they've been learning a lot about how robots interact with people and can be applied in different kind of environments and how it's supposed to support different kinds of people different ages of different classes of different abilities this specific class is for older adults how can we use this robots to support older adults and media needs at home so I want to hear your perspective from that and just you know have an interesting discussion and would love to invite you to join that it's going to happen on the 3rd of November between 3 and 4 pm which is an hour students will be in class and going to be having a really really interesting discussion to have that you know to hard space and that we wanted you to you know remember that you'll be collecting via Zoom so you don't have to leave your home you'll be in the comfort of your home we have a laser reading assignments for you just to make the conversation more interesting and fun activity of actually drawing the kind of robots you would like to have in your home so I think we would like to invite you for that and we'd love you to join that um I have a registration link that I'm gonna Post in the chat um so basically you'll provide me with your information if you're interested and I'll give you a call and explain um what you need to do in order to participate foreign facilitators for today this has been such an amazing opportunity um you know there's a lot of great work being uh being done um at the life home and we're so glad you were able to share it with all of us um for all of the people that are attending today uh please know that you'll be getting a feedback survey uh from Catherine tomorrow it'll be coming to you via email um if you can please let us know your thoughts on this program and on future programs that would be terrific um we are also going to be sending in about a week I'll link to the recording of this video uh this session it will also be posted on our YouTube channel and any of the questions that were not answered in the chat today um we will be sending you all a q a document it'll be a list of everything that was asked and answered and also questions that were asked that we did not have time for today and uh Wendy and Samuel are generously going to spend some additional time after this session answering those questions in writing and we'll be sending that document to you along with the link to the video that'll be in about a week it will not be with the survey that you'll be receiving tomorrow thank you so much for joining us for Living Well digitally and enjoy the rest of your day bye everybody thank you thank you bye everyone

2022-10-06 10:28

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