OSU IGERT in Aging Sciences: Gerontechnology to Support Increased Healthspan
The Oregon State University IGERT in Aging Sciences is an interdisciplinary training program aimed at the development of a new generation of scientists with the skills necessary to address the science, products, and policies that will optimize function and independence of older adults in our society. The program consists of four core areas, one of them being the Gerontechnology Core, which addresses supportive technologies for improving the health span (from cellular to societal). In this talk, I will present several projects from the Gerontechnology Core covering topics in sensing technology, open source software development, and design of the home environment. I will conclude with a discussion of the PULSE project designed to study the linkages between personality processes and health. I will discuss the use of information visualization for providing feedback to study participants and the implications of the results for any monitoring situation in which participant data may be provided back to the participants under study in order to empower them in making behavior changes. An MP4 file of the talk can be found here (right-click and choose Save As to download).
Ronald Metoyer is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. He received a B.S. in Computer Engineering from UCLA in 1994 and a Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2002. His research interests span the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Visualization, and Computer Graphics and Animation. His current research is focused on information visualization where he seeks to support end users in dealing with the large amount of data becoming available from a growing number of data sources. Dr. Metoyer's work has applications in ecology, healthy aging, energy consumption, and K-12 education. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM and was the recipient of a 2002 National Science Foundation CAREER award.
