2004 Everyday Technologies for Alzheimer Care Grant

People with Alzheimer’s disease often have difficulty remembering to do everyday tasks or the correct steps to complete them. Electronic technology has the potential to provide necessary prompts for activities of daily living, but a new and unfamiliar system may itself be confusing or disruptive.

Alan Newell, Ph.D., and colleagues are investigating the use of television as a compromise between technology-based prompting and a fear of new systems. The researchers will conduct focus groups and one-on-one interviews with people with Alzheimer’s disease, family caregivers and health care professionals to determine the types of activities for which prompting would be useful and the current methods used to help people with such activities. The team will develop and revise the new system based on ongoing feedback from these participants.

The investigators will test different modes of television-based prompts, such as clips of recognizable television characters, cartoons of such characters, new cartoon characters, or “animated” objects (for example, a pill box that opens and closes). They will also be assessing the level of realism needed in these representations of activities.

The goals of the project are to complete (1) a prototype design of a digital television–based prompting system, (2) guidelines regarding user needs and the most effective representations of activities of daily living and (3) educational resources for development engineers to inform the production of such a system.