Leveraging Skills into Independent Living: Distributed Cognition and Cognitive Disability

Revision with unchanged content. 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.

PhD in Computer Sciencefrom the University of Colorado USA, develops andassesses socio-technical systems for persons withdisabilities. He is a senior researcher at theFraunhofer Institute for Applied InformationTechnology in Bonn Germany.