ATU658 – Replay – Pitt University – Healthy Home Lab – Paulina Villacreces, MS and Dr. John Pearlman

—– Transcript Starts Here —–

Paulina Villacreces:

Hi, this is Paulina Villacreces and I’m assistant professor at the Rehab Science and Technology Department at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of Product Development for the Healthy Home Laboratory.

Jon Perlman:

And my name is Jon Perlman. I am the chair of the Department of Rehab Science and Technology and the technical director of Pitt’s Healthy Home Lab. And this is your Assistive technology update.

Josh Anderson:

Hello and welcome to your Assistive technology update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 658 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on January 5th, 2024. All of us here at Assistive Technology Update are still out on vacation, celebrating the holidays, celebrating the new year, and spending some extra time with family. But we did not want to leave you hanging and not have a show this week. So today we’ll have a replay of our show from November 11th, 2022, in which we talked to the folks from the Healthy Home Lab. This program out of Pitt University is a super cool program, a really great interview, and we really hope that you do enjoy it.

We will be back next week with all brand new shows, all brand new content, all brand new interviews as we talk to those thought leaders, those creators and those amazing [inaudible 00:01:36] professionals out there in the world, we do want to take a moment to wish everyone a very happy New Year as we look forward to the new things coming in 2024. And as always, listeners, we thank you for taking time out of your day to listen to our show. Apologize for being out for some time and having to have a few replays in there, but we’ll have all new shows coming up next week. But now let’s go ahead and get on with introducing our guests. On today’s show we are super excited to have Paulina Villacreces and Jon Perlman on now. They are out of the University of Pittsburgh and are here to talk about the Healthy Home Laboratory and all the really cool stuff that they’re doing there. So let’s go ahead and get on with the show

Listeners, let’s not lie. Over the course of the last few years, almost all of us have ended up spending a lot more time in our homes. For individuals who are aging or have disabilities, staying in their home is a great way to stay independent. But age-related disabilities and other factors can compromise the safety and security that we all enjoy in our homes. Well, our guest today are Paulina Villacreces and Jon Perlman from the University of Pittsburgh, and they’re here to tell us about the Healthy Home Laboratory and how it can assist folks with aging in place and staying safe while doing so. Paulina, Jon, welcome to the show.

Jon Perlman:

Thanks, Josh. Happy to be part of the podcast.

Josh Anderson:

Yeah, and I am really excited to get into talking about the Healthy Home Laboratory and all the cool stuff that you all do. But first, can you start us off by telling our listeners a little bit about yourselves and your backgrounds?

Jon Perlman:

Sure. I’ll start. My name is Jon Perlman. I am an engineer by training and have been at the University of Pittsburgh now for closing in on 20 years, both doing my PhD and then serving as faculty. And my background, I grew up with my stepfather, he has a spinal cord injury and uses a wheelchair for his day-to-day mobility. And I grew up really learning and developing technology to support him, to be safe and independent, and that’s what I’ve translated into my career and excited to be part of the Healthy Home Lab team, which is just a wonderful place for us to come together from the university as well as with partners in the community to address really tangible challenges with scalable and practical solutions to help people age safely and independently in their homes.

Josh Anderson:

Awesome. And Paulina, what about you?

Paulina Villacreces:

Yeah, so my background is in industrial design and ergonomics and my work has focused on designing and developing assistive technology with the aim of providing innovative solutions to obtain optimal human environment and interactions that promote human health and wellbeing. And I am new to the Healthy Home Laboratory. I joined about a year ago and prior to joining the Healthy Home Laboratory, I was working at Promovilidad where we specialized in the design and development of assistive technology for people with disabilities and less resource settings in Ecuador.

Josh Anderson:

Awesome. And I could probably just go into talking about your background for the rest of the show and probably really enjoy hearing about that, but that’s not why we’re here. So kind of a question just to both of you. So we’ve talked about it a little bit and you’ve mentioned it, but what is the Healthy Home Laboratory?

Jon Perlman:

Thanks, Josh. I’ll start just provide some background to the project and the house itself. So we as a group in my department, we operate at this intersection between rehab and technology. We run a clinical outpatient clinic for assistive technology here in the Pittsburgh area in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. And what we as a team in the department recognize is there’s a shift into needing more technology, supportive technology and better technology in the home. And as we recognize that care needs to be provided in the home and better technologies needed to be provided in the home, we also recognize that across the university and in the community, there’s also many different groups that are working on this. And so the Healthy Home Lab is a community-based laboratory in a hundred-year-old home that the university invested in. And the goal of that lab is to bring people together from the community and the university to tackle these major problems and come up with scalable solutions.

And so we have a really wide range of groups up to about 50 people now engaged. They cross over from the engineering disciplines, the environmental health disciplines, the clinical service disciplines of occupational physical therapy, nursing, community paramedics and MDs, physiatrists and other clinicians and health policy experts into one really physical place focused on a critical topic for our region.

And that sort of is the background of the healthy home. We’ve only really launched it in the last couple of months in terms of having the physical site, but we’ve been working on it for over a year and a half. And one of the key goals that I had as an engineer is to bring in industrial designers because I know that we, as a engineering discipline, we understand how to build and the technical aspects and we’re very deductive in terms of our approach to designing things. And the industrial designers know how to design really usable, beautiful technologies that we know are absent right now in the product lineup to support people to age with age safely and independently in the home. And so one of our most important hires into the team has been Paulina to help support and drive our product roadmap.

Paulina Villacreces:

This lab is very important to us in the sense that it’s really a living laboratory for real world interventions and best practices on how to adapt and equip a home to support individuals as they age in place and also as their needs and abilities change in various stages of their life. And so we are really excited to be part of this laboratory and start working to help older adults be able to age in place safely and independently.

Josh Anderson:

Excellent. And as you kind of talked about the planning and everything else, and I know you said you’ve just kind of had the physical house, the physical space for a little bit of time. Tell me a little bit about the house and maybe kind of what went into the procurement of it and maybe some challenges that you weren’t expecting when you got into that part of kind of executing the program.

Jon Perlman:

Sure. I’ll start here. I mean, we’ve been looking for a house for this full year and a half, almost two years that we’ve been setting this project up. And the housing stock in Pittsburgh and this region in general is very old. It’s not age-friendly. And we looked for months and months to try to identify a space that would not only serve as an example of a traditional house, but give us the flexibility to do renovations. And so fortunately, after working closely with the facilities and real estate team at Pitt, we identified this house that’s right near campus. It’s a hundred years old, it architecturally is beautiful inside. It was purchased by the university from a family that had lived there, had several generations. And when we walked in initially when they still owned the house, there was a queen-sized bed in the dining room. And that sent a message to all of us that it was really the perfect house because that bed in the dining room was an example of one of the major challenges, which is that houses don’t typically have accessible environments, accessible bedrooms on the main floor.

And it sent this message that this type of environment is exactly, that’s the challenge we wanted to be able to solve, which is, how does somebody, a family that’s got an older generation wanting to stay in their house who has a disability, how do we provide that supportive environment in their home?

And so originally the university bought it in April and we went through a few months actually of remediation of issues in the house, including some mold, some asbestos, some lead-based paint, other structural challenges that are really commonplace in older homes. And so it took us several months actually to get access to it, but it is a traditional Pittsburgh, you know hundred-year-old home that has knob and tube wiring, had gaslight plumbing throughout the house, and has many generations of history living there. And we’re in close contact with the family who we bought it from, who is incredibly supportive of our efforts and really part of the story of what we’re trying to accomplish. And I’ll hand it off to Paulina to talk about the characteristics of the house in terms of the architectural detail and how the challenges that poses for us to design products that fit within that architectural beauty.

Paulina Villacreces:

Yeah, thanks Jon. Just to add, as Jon mentioned, this house really gives us access firsthand to all the challenges and barriers that older adults and people with disabilities have to face when they’re aging and losing perhaps mobility or have some sort of condition that limits their ability to perform activities of daily living. And so this house, as Jon mentioned, for example, has very steep and narrow entry steps and also stairways. The bedrooms, as Jon mentioned, they’re located in the second floor as well as the full bathrooms. They’re all on the second floor. And this house really lacks any type of accessibility features. Additionally, there’s these older homes usually expose individuals to pollutants and chemicals or different hazards due to the antiquated building methods creating a risk for poor health outcomes. And they do require a considerable number of modifications and to accommodate aging and disability needs.

So for example, we are looking into building and designing a bathroom on the first floor so that it is accessible to users within the first floor. We are also working on identifying different gaps in the market for different technologies for stair climbing, for example. And so given that the house has these very steep entry stairs and also stairs in the inside, we are working on different devices that could help with stair climbing in the home. And so we identify that the gaps in the market also offer opportunities for design improvement for what is currently available. And so for example, as I mentioned, there’s a gap in the market for devices used for stair climbing. There aren’t many options besides chairlifts, for example. And these really can limit the mobility of older adults and people with disabilities because they’re no longer able to climb stairs. And so our goal is really to provide a wide range of stair climbing options that help older adults and people with disabilities at different stages of their lives.

So starting with devices that provide perhaps minimal support and devices that provide maximum support while still promoting their skills, abilities and mobility because we do believe that with the appropriate support, older adults can be able to climb stairs on their own. And in this way we can promote their mobility and ability to climb stairs and allow them to remain independent in this way. So there are many challenges that the home poses, and it’s really understanding how to approach these challenges in the best way so that we support older adults and peoples with disabilities in the best way possible.

Josh Anderson:

Oh, that’s awesome. And yeah, I know a lot of the older homes, and I’ve been to Pittsburgh a couple of times, and I know the first time I was amazed. Nobody tells you how pretty it is with all the rivers and everything, but yes, I know much like when you get into downtown Indianapolis, a lot of the homes have been there for a long time. So you mentioned a lot of the issues of course would just older building materials and things, but also no one ever thought to put the bedroom and the bathroom on the first floor, that was just kind of the thing they didn’t do. And man, that does cause a challenge, and that’s great that you’re thinking of ways that the folks that want to stay in their homes still can, you know, especially if they’ve owned it for a long time and don’t want to have to buy something else or move into assisted living. It’s definitely a great way to be able to help them.

In kind of looking through your website and kind of doing a little bit of research for today, I found that you guys have some different kind of services and stuff, and Paulina, you kind of led into this. Can you tell us about what the technology kind of testing and evaluation program, what does that look like?

Jon Perlman:

I can cover that topic.

Josh Anderson:

Okay.

Jon Perlman:

So we as a group have been working on product standards and product evaluation for many years in our department. And the challenges of making sure a consumer has access to a reliable product is something that’s often difficult for a consumer to figure that out because what comes from many of these many companies is more marketing strategies. And for these types of assistive technologies, we often don’t see the consumer as the payer. And so when we’re both the payer and the consumer, we have a lot of control over the technologies and we can pick and choose the best ones for us. But for assistive technologies and medical devices, we know the payer is often not the consumer, so don’t have a lot of leverage to drive product selection. And so the Healthy Home Evaluation team is focused on doing the types of engineering evaluation to make sure these products are safe.

We obviously apply those to any products that Paulina, for instance, is designing, but we also serve as a test bed for companies who want to have an independent evaluation of a product. And that can be, I have a team of engineers that work on the healthy home. That could be the type of technical evaluation that’s important to make sure something doesn’t break or you know a grab bar doesn’t rip out of a wall. And then there’s another really important aspect, which is the usability of the product, and I’ll hand it off to Paulina to talk about the importance and how we measure usability of products as an aspect of our evaluation step in the Healthy Home.

Paulina Villacreces:

Sure. Thanks Jon. And so just to start off, I think it’s important to mention some of the limitations of the existing technology. I’ll just mention a few, and that is that most of the products that are designed are are not designed thinking about the end users or the interaction between the user, the environment, or multiple environments and the devices. The products, most of the products available in the market also have a very clinical look and feel that is not really user-friendly and does not seamlessly blend into the home, which leads to users not wanting to use these devices as they disrupt their beautiful homes. These devices are usually designed for a single use that helps with a single need at a point in time and don’t really provide an integrated solution that evolves with older adults and their needs and as their needs and abilities change.

And so our goal from a usability standpoint is to really look at the user from a human-centered design perspective to really understand their skills, their abilities, their needs, their challenges, their environment, and how to best support them so that they’re able to remain independent. And so this includes, as Jon mentioned before, looking at problems and challenges from different perspectives. So from the occupational therapist, physical therapist lenses, assistive technology specialists, designers, engineers, and many other specialties, and really a multidisciplinary team of experts to get a better understanding of how to best approach a problem and how to best provide a solution.

With that, we’re also looking into designing aesthetically pleasing devices that integrate into the home that are not only user-friendly, but also highly functional and ergonomic while still being beautiful to integrate into the home. And we’re also focusing on designing versatile and dynamic systems as opposed to single devices and these systems that are universal and that can really adapt to the different needs and abilities of users at various stages of their life.

Josh Anderson:

Awesome. Paulina, are you able to tell us about any of those systems that you’re currently working on or maybe have worked on?

Paulina Villacreces:

Yeah, sure! Yes. For example, right now we’ve designed this technology that we call Mobius, which at first glance it looks, and it’s installed just like chair rail molding around the home. But beneath this decorative molding is a universal rail system where you can attach different devices. And so for example, grab bars in the bathroom or handrails in hallways, stairs assist devices on stairs and many others that can solve a wide range of mobility and accessibility needs around the home.

And these devices can be easily attached, moved and repositioned without the need of a constructor or costly modifications. If a device is no longer needed, the rail can be concealed with this decorative molding cover and just blend into the home beautifully. So really thinking about designing systems that can be adapted as needs change throughout time and at different stages for older adults and people with disabilities.

Josh Anderson:

Oh, that’s great because I know so many things, especially age-related or degenerative, so where I might just need some support, maybe some help king of getting, say up the stairs. Now I may need a chairlift or something of that sort later, but I want to use the skills that I still have. So that’s great that you, you’re thinking that way and not having to have another home modification evaluation and a contractor get quotes, get all those kinds of things, but kind of do it one time and then change out the pieces and parts, especially, it’s not always just one person living in the house.

So that’s really great, and I love that you’re actually taking into account the aesthetics. And Jon, I don’t remember if you or Paulina brought this up, but yes, in assistive technology, a lot of times it does kind of just, Hey, let’s meet this need, let’s kind of do this and it’ll look like it looks, and in the home that doesn’t always work. So I like that you’re working that right into the chair rail and really making it kind of fit into the home and not be the first giant thing you notice when you walk in.

Jon Perlman:

Yeah. I’ll just add Josh that, sorry, Paulina, just that we’re reminded of this all the time when we go into the Healthy Home because it has chair rails again built a hundred years ago in the Rust Belt where people took craftsmanship very seriously. And so we have these beautiful 8 to 10 inch architectural molding throughout this house, and there’s so much design that has really taken shortcuts for this type of technology that the existing technology for railings and chair lifts and grab bars, that it does stick out like a sore thumb in an environment like this. And so we’re reminded about the beauty and the craftsmanship and the architectural detail in these old homes, and we know that people that cherish that, that love these homes that live in the homes for multiple generations want to keep that look and poorly designed products are often rejected. People don’t want them in the house because of visually what it does to the house. So it’s a major theme that Paulina really drives in terms of the look and feel of all the products we’re developing.

Josh Anderson:

Yeah, and you brought up those great points, and I mean there also is that time that maybe you want to hand it down to a family member or sell it just because Pittsburgh gets winter just like Indiana does. Maybe someday you’re tired of those winters and want to move somewhere warmer, so it’s great if you don’t have to spend the money to rip a bunch of stuff out that may be needed in the future. You can still have it aesthetically pleasing and actually have it look good for the people that it’s handed down to and still be available as they age and need those tools as well.

Paulina Villacreces:

Yeah, exactly. That’s one of our goals because we were also thinking of different places like community, continuing care retirement communities, and that sort of places where they provide care also to older adults and people with disabilities, and so how they can easily just change different devices and then also how to translate that, do it also in the home, and just have all these structures and buildings with these simple chair rail molding that allows for different changes and adaptations and considers different abilities and skills of different people and users and how they interact with spaces, with the environment and with the different devices.

Josh Anderson:

Jon, Paulina, if our listeners want to find out more about you, about all the work, great work that you all are doing at Pitt about the Healthy Home Laboratory, what’s the best ways for them to do that?

Paulina Villacreces:

Yeah, so our website is the healthyhomelaboratory.pitt.edu, and anyone can contact us through our email, which is healthyhomelab@pitt.edu.

Josh Anderson:

Excellent. We’ll put all that information in the show notes, and I feel like I could sit here and talk all day about the amazing stuff you both are doing, but I know we are getting close to out of time, so I do want to take the time definitely to thank you for coming on and telling us about this, and it sounds like it’s something where we’ll have to have you back on maybe sometime in the future just to hear about all the great things that you’re developing.

Paulina Villacreces:

Yeah. Thank you so much for having us today. This was a great time and interview.

Jon Perlman:

Yeah, thanks Josh. It was really our pleasure and we’re excited to build partnerships and continue to grow the network that the Healthy Home Lab has already started to develop.

Josh Anderson:

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and brought over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easter Seals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in beautiful, Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time, bye-bye!