Publications:

• Modeste M. Kenne, Prasanna Date, Ronald Eguchi, Zhenghui Hu, Julie Rousseau, Nalini Venkatasubramanian. “iFair: Achieving Fairness in the Allocation of Scarce Resources for Senior Health Care.” In IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP), 2024. (Accepted for Publication.)
• Allred, A., Arauz, A., Bazargani, M., Bhope, R., Boomershine, E., Campbell, N., … & Wang, G. (2023). “Testing CareDEX: SAGAT methodology deployed for a disaster drill at a senior living community“. Issues in Information Systems, 24(1).
• Allred, A., Boomershine, E., Davison, C., Wimmer, J., Penny, C., Rousseau, J., Venkatasubramanian, N. (2023). “Analyzing Student Experiences and Career Pathways for Healthcare Student Volunteers Participating in a Disaster Response Drill: A Mixed-Methods Study“. The CTE Journal, 11(2), 29-33.
• Rahul Atul Bhope, K. R. Jayaram, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, Ashish Verma and Gegi Thomas. 2023. “FLIPS: Federated Learning using Intelligent Participant Selection.” arXiv:2308.03901 [cs.LG] (accepted to Middleware 2023).
• Andrew Chio, Daokun Jiang, Peeyush Gupta, Georgios Bouloukakis, Roberto Yus, Sharad Mehrotra, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, “SmartSPEC: A framework to generate customizable, semantics-based smart space datasets”, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, 93, 101809, 2023.

Research:

The public-facing abstract of this project can be found here.

The proposed research aims to achieve information preparedness to help build disaster resilience for our aging communities using community-contributed information and emerging IoT and big data technologies. The fundamental research questions of this project are as follow:

• Question 1: What are effective ways to solicit information from the community at large that can help during response? (Completeness, accuracy, changing needs)
• Question 2: How can we effectively model & represent community contributed content into a data repository in ways that it is readily available to responders during an event? (Heterogeneity, information validity, timeliness)
• Question 3: What role can smart space technologies play in helping with disaster response? Another question is how accessible are these technologies to low-income older adults? (Deployment cost, heterogeneity, maintenance)
• Question 4: How do we integrate community contributed data and dynamic data feeds into the tools currently in use by the response community in order to seamlessly make relevant data available to first responders? (Understanding process, legacy integration)
• Question 5: How do we support appropriate data exchange while preventing its misuse and maintaining the privacy of the elderly? (Information security, privacy, regulations)

Hence the key steps to enable the CareDEX vision consist of the following:

Proactively co-produce information about the needs of SHFs, responders, and individuals for information preparedness during a disaster.

This involves soliciting and gathering, apriori, site-specific information about SHFs (e.g., building floor plans, status of life safety systems) and data about residents useful during emergencies, mechanisms/protocols to collect dynamic data such as that caregiver daily records, and data generated by in-situ and body-worn sensors. The goal is to identify the data that could be useful during emergencies, schedules for collection, and the privacy implications of data sharing.

Co-Design and develop a secure data exchange platform CareDEX

A secure data exchange for policy-based information sharing. CareDEX will support a hybrid cloud deployment that seamlessly enables data to be securely stored at the private on-premise machines (at the SHF) and/or at the public cloud. It will support access based on organizational and fine-grained individual’s policies. CareDEX will also incorporate GIS tools to create regional situational awareness on infrastructure conditions.

CareDEX Pilot Demonstration Study and Scenarios

A pilot test of the CareDEX prototype will be developed with our core civic partners, Front Porch Senior Living (a leading senior care provider) and the Fire Protection Research Foundation to marry the data needs of first responders with senior care professionals under natural hazards. CareDEX will be instantiated using 2 simulated emergency scenarios – a large wildfire event that necessitates evacuation of seniors to safety and a complex event when the fire event occurs during a pandemic such as Covid19 with altered needs.

The quad chart below summarizes the main goals and activities of this project.