| Outcome/accomplishment:
By conducting a survey of older adults and people with disabilities, the
Quality of Life Technology Center (QoLT) gathered important initial evidence
for determining what trade-offs people are willing to make between privacy
and varying degrees of independent living.
QoLT is an Engineering Research
Center (ERC) funded by NSF and headquartered at Carnegie Mellon University
(CMU) and the University of Pittsburgh (UPitt).
Impact/benefits:
These data provide researchers with initial evidence for implicit trade-offs
involved in the adoption of quality of life technology. They help
researchers to determine where people make the distinction between monitoring
technology that is invaluable versus that which is unacceptably invasive.
This knowledge holds important implications for the design of future applications.
Explanation/ background:
The rapid development of advanced technologies has resulted in corresponding
concerns about potential impacts on privacy. This is especially true
in QoLT applications, which involve monitoring, collecting, and transmitting
data about individual-level behavior, some of which can be quite detailed.
Because privacy concerns are potential barriers to adoption and/or effectiveness
of intelligent systems for household use, the Center has been examining
various dimensions of privacy to better understand where people really
draw the line. The Center's ultimate goal is to inform the design
of future technologies so they minimize privacy concerns.
Researchers learned that
respondents were generally accepting of sensors and video recording that
excluded the bedroom/bathroom, but acceptance dropped off significantly
– a “tipping point” – for video throughout the home, even if it would serve
to maintain independence and avoid having to take up residence in a nursing
home. In addition, sharing collected monitoring data with family
members and doctors was found to be more acceptable than sharing it with
insurance companies. |
