An artificial intelligence system for helping people with dementia

Citation

(2007), "An artificial intelligence system for helping people with dementia", Sensor Review, Vol. 27 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/sr.2007.08727dab.002

An artificial intelligence system for helping people with dementia

An artificial intelligence system for helping people with dementia

Older people with cognitive disabilities have a hard time completing everyday tasks that healthy people take for granted. This is especially true for people suffering from Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. Researchers from Dundee University in Scotland and the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo in Canada are working on automated artificial intelligence systems for helping such people in completing the everyday task of hand washing.

The team recently published an award winning paper at the 5th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems; the paper explains the need for such automated assistive systems. Older adults living with cognitive disabilities (such as Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia) have difficulty completing activities of daily living (ADLs), and are usually assisted by a human caregiver who prompts them when necessary. The dependence on a caregiver is difficult for the patient, and can lead to feelings of anger and helplessness, particularly for private ADLs such as using the washroom. Computerized cognitive assistive technologies are devices that may have the potential to allow this elderly population to complete such ADLs more independently by non-invasively monitoring the users during the task, providing guidance or assistance when necessary.

The team led by Dr Jesse Hoey has developed a vision-based system that monitors an individual during the hand washing process and verbally prompts when assistance is necessary. In addition, the system displays a demonstration video to guide the patient if the audio prompts are not effective. The system works in real-time and utilizes the framework of Markov decision processes to monitor the patient's progress and it can automatically adapt to the patient's level of awareness and dementia level.

The team has developed and evaluated the system using controlled experiments with actors in preparation for clinical trials which are currently taking place in Toronto. The video shows one of the actor trials. The person intentionally fails to follow the proper sequence of steps during hand washing, and the system prompts him with the correct action. On the left- most part of the video, a third person view of the scene is given and on the right-most part is the view from the system's camera including the tracking of the actor's hands and towel. In the middle, information is given about the variables that the system monitors and have to do with the patient's levels of responsiveness, progress and awareness.

The system is general enough that the team hopes to extend its use for other tasks such as tooth brushing and toileting. Upon successful completion of the clinical trials, the researchers hope that they might be able to commercialize their system to help the more than 5 million people in the USA alone suffering from Alzheimer's disease; in fact, the Alzheimer's association says that every 72s a new person develops the disease.

Source: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics web blog.