Today I presented work from the STRETCH team on our emotion-monitoring devices to an international conference in Sydney. What was it all about?

The STRETCH team believe that home healthcare technology should not only help older adults improve the physical health, but also their mental health.

Lots of research has gone into developing technologies to help monitor what is going on inside an older persons’ home (such as making dinner or having a shower), so that the monitoring system can report worrying trends to friends or family.

While such research is important, it doesn’t support the emotional wellbeing of the older adults being monitored. The STRETCH team want to change this, and develop technology to successfully monitor how older adults are feeling so that our system can do something to support people who are having excess negative feelings.

To ensure that privacy is retained, we wanted our logging system to involve the older adults doing something. This has the side-effect of actually helping the older adults along the way

– research shows that active engagement in thinking about your wellbeing can cause improvements. We also wanted our designs to be tangible; to require physical interaction to log the mood.

Rather than start our designs from scratch, we explored a variety of existing paper-based psychological measures of emotion. We selected three different scales – one that was word based, one that was based around a cartoon face of different emotions, and one based on movement within space. We then constructed a variety of paper prototypes based on these scales, before selecting three to test (including the Emotion Octagon shown above).

We wanted to demonstrate that these paper prototypes using tangible inputs would produce results similar to the established psychological scales. After all, there is no point collecting wellbeing data if you can’t trust what that data means.

Through our lab-study with 14 older adults (aged 63 to 90), we found that our paper prototypes were collecting accurate enough data. This demonstrates that we are moving in the right direction.

We’re currently in the process of finalising some more aesthetically-pleasing versions of the devices which can capture the data electronically. We will be testing these devices with households across MK and Exeter to explore whether such devices can support the wellbeing of older adults as they age in place.

If you want to find out more about our work, you can read our published paper on ORO.

Clifford’s research uses the Applied Social Identity Approach to investigate how social relationships can benefit health and how sharing a collective identity can enable members of disadvantaged communities to deal with adversity. He also examines how interventions such as Social Prescribing can be used to reduce loneliness and to reconnect isolated and marginalised populations.

Being the face to face part of the research team I am the one not used to working from home but like all of us, have had to adapt. I am making lots of phone calls to older people and the participants on the project. The main word I find myself using again and again is resilience. This has been a key word in our research and when we began Circles of Support (CoS) and STRETCH 3 years ago we didn’t expect the situation we find ourselves in now. I notice how adaptable older people are.

There has been an emphasis on the lighter touch contact and how important this has become for older people shielding- the wave to a neighbour, the chat over the garden fence, the brief contact with a carer or visiting community nurse. One older woman who is a carer I spoke to was baking weekly, freezing and bagging her cake up, all so it would be safe for her neighbours to have with their afternoon tea. Not only is she now caring for her husband with a dementia on her own but this means she can still support her neighbours and satisfy her love of baking! People need to feel useful at whatever age and want to help in whatever way they can.

Yes, people are frustrated but I hear few talking of fear, more of a shared feeling that we are all in this together.

Some older people have embraced technology and made it useful for them in a way that they could not have forseen a few months ago. Pilates classes via Zoom, Shared reading via open phone calls, Skype communication with far flung relatives. Most still prefer the phone and many are finding they now have more contact than they did before lockdown. One participant finds he now has more support than he did before. He was a supporter rather than someone who liked to ask for help. Another participant is feeling overwhelmed by the number of video calls as his family check in on his welfare.

There is a lot of goodwill out there and I hope the extra neighbourliness that has been revealed will last a long time after lockdown has ended.

Jessica Cohen

Service Coordinator Age UK Exeter

Prior to starting at the OU Paul was a Senior Lecturer for over 16 years working at Coventry University, BCU, and Huddersfield University. His teaching was focused around computer programming, embedded systems, DSP and audio electronics. He has a PhD in Music Technology from the University of York.

We met Mark and Claire Warren at the Bonymaen care home in Swansea. It provides short term support (which is maximum six weeks) for older people who have spent a long time in hospital and need help transitioning back to living in their own home. The care home consists of two bed room house where older adults practice independent living before preparing to leave. It comes with fully fitted kitchen that has got gas cooker, electricity cooker, microwave, Kettle, washing machine, and dryer. There is an emergency button to call for help.

Key discussion points

• They think that employing technology for monitoring older people will be helpful in assessing people’s ability to live independently. It can make it clear how much of a support an older person needs, which will in turn not only help to save huge cost and time, but also direct the resources into people who really need that.
• 2.  They have assessment criterion. They evaluate people every week, until they make sure that they are able to carry their life independently.  Then they make a decision in a meeting between nurses, physiotherapist, and social workers.
• 3. Social Isolation is a common problem, and have lots of complications such as: losing confidence, depression, and anxiety. Older adults become less independent. The care home also organises socialisation events, and activities and noticed that some people who meet in the care home tend to make friendship and stay in touch.
• 4. They have connections with CoS ( family, friends, GPs) and  also helps older people to maintain the connections and develop new ones while they are at the care home.
• 5. They have connections with the health service. They share information over the phone or by email with GPs. GPs also come every day. The nurse can see the results of the blood test.

We designed and built button based tangible user interfaces (TUIs) for mood self logging. Currently our mood TUI has 3 off the shelf bluetooth buttons that correspond to happy, neutral and sad mood states. When a user presses any of the buttons, it communicates to the raspberry pie microcontroller which then logs this data on the web server. We have designed and 3D printed three geometries (horizontal line, vertical line and triangular) as holders for the buttons. These 3 TUIs are currently being pilot tested inside our building near the entrance, exit and at the coffee machine.

A host of new smart devices now make it feasible for people to be monitored by doctors while recovering in their homes. Devices range from wearable technology which measures indicators such as heart rate and temperature, to home sensors recording patient activities, to automated carer management systems. The project’s key challenge is integrating technology with these circles of support, comprising a wide range of people with very different relationships to the patient, levels of medical expertise and technological competence, who all need to share information with one another.