Every year, nearly 1.5 million unpaid caregivers across Pennsylvania provide an estimated $22 billion worth of care to support loved ones with disabilities. Family caregivers are an essential piece of the puzzle in meeting the needs of Pennsylvania’s aging population, but many caregivers lack an awareness of available services, knowledge of how to begin accessing them, and confidence in applying for support. The goal of this project is to enhance support for family caregivers by evaluating the newly launched PA CareKit and assessing the effectiveness of the CareKit in practice. The CareKit is a “caregiver toolkit”, a collection of tools, information, and resources to address key challenges in the caregiver journey.

This project examines the potential of utilizing smart home technology to address the needs of vulnerable populations residing in challenging housing environments. The HHL will identify, evaluate, and develop emerging smart home safety technology solutions that reduce the risk of falls and unintentional injuries in low-income public senior housing.

This project leverages advancements in smart home technology to modernize the HUD Older Adults Home Modifications Grant Program (OAHMP) and similar home modification programs for older adults. The HHL will identify, evaluate, recommend and provide “how-to” training resources on simply ways to implement low-cost, high-impact, commercially available technologies that support safe aging in place to enhance the impact of home modifications in low-income settings.

Advancing the development of Mobius—a comprehensive and adaptable rail system to be used in place of architectural molding to mount a variety of modular assistive technology attachments. This funding is intended to advance the prototype system closer to commercialization and market launch, guided by higher resolution prototype development, focus group co-design, and field installations with older adult end users.

This project contributes to the advancement of ShowerSteady—a novel, modular, reversible, and adaptive grab bar system for the bathtub/shower to increase safety and independence when bathing. This innovation addresses a key problem for bathroom adaptive equipment—installing assistive technology in the presence of acrylic/fiberglass shower inserts can result in extensive and expensive home modifications, sometimes for just installing a single grab bar.

This project explores the initial development of PrivyPod—a novel modular and prefabricated bathroom system to reduce cost, material waste, and installation time while achieving a higher quality product compared to traditional building methods. This grant is focused on conceptualization, initial prototype development, and several rounds of stakeholder feedback and testing.

This purpose of this project was to assess the feasibility of expanding assessment for home and community-based services to include residential environmental hazards that pose a risk to aging in place.

Easily administered, standardized level of care determination (LCD) tool to determine if an individual is clinically eligible for nursing facility level of care