The Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center's research deals with almost all aspects of human living. QoLT systems will affect people in different settings with different functionalities. The setting may be at home, providing personal support and help for daily living; it could be a neighborhood, where the systems help a person to engage in community activities; or it could be more societal where a person commutes to work and contributes to society through employment. In each setting QoLT systems provide different forms of functionality: enhancing dexterity and mobility, helping with some home chores, supporting memory, coaching through job functions, helping to drive cars, and so on.

Our approach to user involvement is characterized by

This approach allows us to produce prototypes and evaluate design solutions according to user criteria. We define this process as Participatory Action Design, which incorporates universal design, but includes much more stakeholder involvement than may be characteristic of current universal design.

Our strategy encompasses a few families of engineered systems that embody the vision as the focus, align our engineering research and development efforts with them, develop a series of integrated prototypes in each family with progressively greater capability over the life span of the ERC, evaluate prototypes in the testbeds, and feed back findings into the main research areas. This overall strategy is depicted in the diagram below.