Development of Assistive Technology for Instrumental Activities of Daily Living for Dementia Homecare Environments.

Abstract

This presentation describes preliminary National Institute of Health (NIH) funded user-centered research into Cognitive Assistive Technology (CAT) for dementia homecare and the subsequent development of a lab for testing the CAT. Caregivers face on-going significant risk throughout the ebb and flow of providing care, as individuals with dementia may lose grasp of their understanding of their circumstances, relying heavily on caregivers for all aspects of their physical and emotional support, as well as prompting and cueing through the multi-step IADLs. Difficulty with IADL tasks such as cooking meals and housekeeping is one feature of early-stage dementia, as these tasks require complex cognitive processing and are cognitively demanding. The goal of this research is to improve caregiver resilience and sustainability of dementia homecare via a low-cost wearable CAT system which can support the IADL task cueing intervention for care recipients called IADL/CAT. IADLs are highly personalized set of needs, requiring a flexible and versatile approach that can be customized and adapted for each individual in a specific setting. Smart-home technologies and assistive technology tools of specific functionalities have been previously developed to partially address those challenges, however, there is currently a lack of low-cost, portable, versatile and programmable interventions that can relieve the physical and emotional burden from caregivers by automatically providing timely, needed and individualized IADL task cueing to care recipients Our working hypothesis is that environmental cueing for an individual with dementia can be recorded and replayed to enable timely feedback and assistance through a IADL/CAT wearable device. This presentation will describe the initial research conducted to not only develop an environmental testing lab for the IADL/CAT project, but the initial system navigation cueing through the 3D model retrieval. Through the development of a lab-based replication/mock-up of environmental relationships which would be found in a home (i.e. connection between a kitchen and dining room) we have been begun to evaluate the IADL/CAT programming features and system usability.