WHEN YOU THINK OF A SMART HOME, voice-controlled personal assistants like Amazon Echo might spring to mind. Yet as Baby Boomers age, smart home technology is increasingly being employed to provide eldercare. With decades of experience designing smart environments for health assistance, Diane (Holder) Cook ’85 is leading this charge. 

“I’ve worked in the area of machine learning and data mining for many years. Smart homes allow me to use these disciplines to better understand human behavior and offer technologies that help humans stay independent in their own homes longer,” Cook notes. 

Hailing from a family of Wheaties, Cook chose Wheaton because of its combination of academic excellence and Christian guidance. She recalls one teacher who “transformed my perspective on physics because he showed how God carefully crafted the world from microcosm to macrocosm.” 

John Hayward, professor of computer science, also stood out. “He encouraged us to find the fun side of our discipline,” she notes. 

Currently the Huie-Rogers Chair Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University, Cook was inducted as a 2016 fellow to the National Academy of Inventors, and she holds several patents in environmental sensor-driven activity model development. She created one of the first fully instrumented smart home test sites and has equipped 100 smart apartments with sensor networks in 10 countries. Cook also co-directs the National Institute on Aging’s training program in gerontechnology and serves as director of its artificial laboratory. 

“The more I analyze sensor-based human behavior the more I appreciate how complex we are. I also see how much we need each other in order to stay emotionally and physically healthy,” Cook says.