Invited Technical Speaker Martha Pollack: Assistive Technology for People with Cognitive Impairment: The Present and the Future

From Anita Borg Institute Wiki

Martha Pollack, Dean and Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan

We are in the midst of a profound demographic shift, moving from a world in which the majority of people are relatively young, to one in which a significant proportion are over the age of 65. This change poses both a challenge and an opportunity for the design of intelligent technology: while many older adults will remain healthy and productive, overall older adults have higher rates of physical and cognitive impairment. Advances in two areas of computer science—wireless sensor networks and AI inference strategies—have made it possible to envision a wide range of technologies that can improve the lives of people with disabilities.

This talk will focus on assistive technology for people with cognitive impairment. Such technology can provide information that helps a person navigate through her environment, when she might otherwise be disoriented; can issue personalized reminders for daily tasks that might be forgotten; and can perform in-home assessment of a person’s performance of routine activities, alerting her and her caregivers to changes that may indicate a need for professional evaluation. I will describe a range of projects on assistive technology for cognition, stressing in particular the need for such systems of being highly individualized and responsive to the changing capabilities and demands of their users.