Collaborative Research: HCC Small: Future Proofing for Age-Related Changing Cognitive Abilities using Smart Objects as Assistive Technologies

People who are experiencing cognitive decline, such as people living with dementia and mild cognitive impairment, want to maintain their independence, even as their abilities change over time. To support this goal, this project will design "future proofing" approaches, in which people use smart objects in their homes and routines that can help them adapt to anticipated changing cognitive abilities over time. The research team will create toolkits, training sessions, and guidebooks that will allow people living with cognitive impairments and when appropriate, their caregivers, to invent, make, and use their own future proofing systems. If successful, ideas and outcomes from this project will help people with changing cognitive abilities maintain their independence for longer periods of time, with better quality of their own life and their relationships with friends, family, and community. The main goal of this project is to create a framework for designing technology that can adapt to changing cognitive abilities over time. The research team will first conduct diary studies to find out when people with changing cognitive abilities experience those changes, what impacts they have on their independence, and what ideas they have for reducing those impacts. The researchers will then hold co-design workshops based on those insights, working with people experiencing cognitive impairments and caregivers to create and develop customizable systems that can adapt to changing abilities and support future proofing approaches to maintaining independence. The team will also develop training, examples, and other materials that will help people adopt and adapt future proofing systems to their own needs. To assess these systems and materials, the researchers will do a long-term study of people using the smart objects in their own lives to understand the extent to which people can make use of them and how well these systems support the project's goals of helping people adapt to longer-term changes in cognitive abilities. Through this, the project lays the groundwork for future exploration of technologies that intelligently adapt to the needs of people experiencing progressive changes in ability more generally. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.