Leveraging Skills into Independent Living- Distributed Cognition and Cognitive Disability

In the US alone, over four and a half million people have cognitive disabilities. Except for deficiencies of mnemonic and executive capabilities, many of them have the potential to live a more independent life. In this book, the author describes a design approach and an example system aimed at providing support to those missing abilities in a socio-technical environment. The system, MAPS, consists of two technical components: a script design tool that allows a caregiver to create, store, edit and reuse scripts of multimedia prompts to guide users thru tasks, and a PDA-based prompter that plays those scripts for persons with cognitive disabilities. The process of technology adoption was also studied as the MAPS system was put in use doing real-life tasks in home, shopping, and employment environments. By extending human-computer interaction (HCI) frameworks, theories, and perspectives, this research shows new ways of using traditional HCI in the design and use of prompting systems. More importantly, this study presents a set of heuristics to aid in the general design of assistive technology with an aim of preventing technology abandonment.

Dr. Stefan Carmien is a staff scientist at the Tecnalia foundation. His work focuses on ubiquitous and mobile assistive technologies and context-aware systems, involving the study of the socio-technological environment, its context, and the human user and deep personal configuration (meta-design) and end-user programming (within a distributed cognition framework) as a solution to technology abandonment. He has also performed studies on image recognition and cognitive disabilities in memory and recall. He was most recently the PI for ASSISTANT, a 2.4 M EC project supporting use of public transportation by elders with disabilities. Stefan holds a Ph.D. in computer science with a certificate in cognitive science from the University of Colorado. His Ph.D. work centered on the design of systems for active task support for people with cognitive disabilities and caregivers. He has contributed many peer-reviewed articles, six book chapters, and is the author of the book "Leveraging Skills into Independent Living Distributed Cognition and Cognitive Disability".