Dr Robert Pedlow

Dr Pedlow is a behavioural scientist who is committed to evidence based research on the use of information and communications technology to support older people and people with disability in living independently. He is the research fellow in the Ageing and Health program at the University of Sydney. He is analysing the factors predicting entry to residential care by older people and use of health services by older people. He is also investigating health outcomes in old age for people ageing with disability.
As an Ed Roberts Fellow in disability studies at the University of California Berkeley he conducted research on the use of mobile phones and wearable fall detection sensors to support older people with age related impairments in living independently. In this work he found similar issues in relation to the acceptability of wearable fall sensors by older people i.e. for the fall detector to be acceptable older people were very concerned that other people would not know that they were wearing the device.
As a senior researcher in the Human factors Research Group at Telstra Research Laboratories Dr Pedlow conducted applied research on the use of the internet, home phones, and mobile phones by people with vision hearing and mobility restrictions and the elderly. A highlight of this work was demonstrating that web pages could be made usable for people with vision impairment who use assistive technology to access the Internet without compromising the usability or aesthetics of the page for sighted users. He also conducted an interview based study of acceptance by older people of wearable alarm and monitoring systems. In this work he found that older people while valuing the security that such systems may offer also see them as stigmatizing and demeaning and resist adopting them.