HomeSHARE 2015 - International Workshop on Issues of Geographically Distributed, Home-Based Testbeds for Pervasive Health Research

Researchers within the pervasive health community would benefit immensely from a geographically distributed, home-based testbed within which to design, develop, and evaluate health technologies in people’s homes. Currently, researchers who work on technology in home environments usually:
deploy small, ad hoc technologies,
recruit participants using convenience sampling rather than representative populations,
spend significant resources to build their own small testbeds, and/or
rely on simulated data to answer research questions.
Such small, local evaluations greatly limit the generalizability of results to a larger population. A geographically distributed testbed, with deployment and management responsibilities divided amongst different research groups, would provide a scalable and cooperative solution to these issues. Such a testbed would push discovery and learning forward by enabling evaluation of technologies, algorithms, and methods with a more diverse population. The construction of such a testbed, however, involves numerous coordination and technological issues.
This workshop will engage the diverse research community represented by the Pervasive Health conference in exploring the technical, ethical, organizational and economic problems with constructing a HomeSHARE testbed, as well as solutions to those problems. The workshop will benefit from both participants who have practical experience with deploying technologies in people’s homes, as well as participants who could utilize such a testbed to further their research.