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Carnegie Mellon, Pitt, UPMC

Quality of Life Technology Center

QoLTOverview

The mission of the Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center is to create intelligent systems that enable older adults and people with disabilities to live independently. This partnership of Carnegie Mellon and Pitt was designated by the National Science Foundation in 2006 as one of its prestigious Engineering Research Centers and given the charter to conduct transformative research, commercialize disruptive products, and educate people of all ages and ability about the needs for and applications of technology in everyday life.

Highlights:

  • For the aged to continue residing in their own homes, they will increasingly need help with instrumental activities of daily living. Together with Intel, the QoLT Center is developing HERB, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, to perform tasks such as meal preparation, cleanup, and housekeeping.
  • PerMMA, short for Personal Mobility and Manipulation Appliance, is an integrated suite of robotic devices and technologies that will directly assist people with grooming, dressing, shopping, and other common tasks. PerMMA will give people with severe disabilities greater opportunity to participate in society.
  • QoLT systems get their intelligence by being perceptive and aware of their surroundings. First-Person Vision is a unique approach to gathering data about a user and her environment based on wearable cameras and computing. Some of the applications of First Person Vision include recognizing other people and way-finding.
  • QoLT Virtual Coach technologies assist people with cognitive or memory impairments. The MemExerciser captures daily events and semi-automatically creates a multimedia lifelog that can be replayed at any time. QoLT Center wheelchair coaches encourage users to properly user their assistive devices and avoid chronic or repetitive motion injuries.
  • The QoLT Center is simultaneously creating new knowledge about individual and societal drivers affecting technology adoption. Researchers in the center's Person & Society group are investigating attitudes toward monitoring, privacy, home assistance, and the trade-offs among them.
  • The center's Safe Driving research is creating technologies that will allow people to operate motor vehicles with confidence later into life. Recent developments include personal navigation systems that learn an individual’s driving patterns and data logging systems that provide quantified measures of a driver’s performance.

 

Contact: Byron Spice, 412-268-9068, bspice@cs.cmu.edu