The number of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is significantly increasing, given the boom in the aging population (i.e., 65 years and older). There exist approximately 5.5 million people in the United States that have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and as a result friends and family often need to provide care and support (estimated at 15 million people to the cost of $1.1 trillion). Common symptoms of Alzheimer's disease include memory loss, drastic behavioral change, depression, and loss in cognitive and/or spatial abilities. To support the growing need for caregivers, this project developed a prototype virtual reality (VR) environment for enabling caregivers to experience typical scenarios, as well as common strategies for managing each scenario, that they may experience when providing care and support, thereby providing. For instance, a patient may turn on a gas stove and then leave, forgetting that the stove is on. The caregiver then would be required to turn the stove off, to minimize any potential
dangers.
The prototype environment, CARETAKVR, was developed as an undergraduate research project for learning the process of research as well as the Unity programming environment and VR. The prototype provides a gamified training tool, masking scenarios as objectives and success with a score, to enable the potential caregiver to feel rewarded for correctly supporting the patient. The virtual patient is controlled via artificial intelligence and follows an initial set of guidelines to behave as a patient with early-stage Alzheimer's may behave. The caregiver is provided with a set of tasks to perform, in VR space, to achieve their goals for each scenario. Common tasks include Check Refrigerator, Check Stove, and Comfort Patient. This project has been demonstrated to colleagues in the health care domain and has seeded future collaborations to iterate the capabilities of this tool. All project artifacts have been open-sourced and are available online.
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Designing for Caregiving: Integrating Robotic Assistance in Senior Living Communities
Robots hold significant promise to assist with providing care to an aging population and to help overcome increasing caregiver demands. Although a large body of research has explored robotic assistance for individuals with disabilities and age-related challenges, this past work focuses primarily on building robotic capabilities for assistance and has not yet fully considered how these capabilities could be used by professional caregivers. To better understand the workflows and practices of caregivers who support aging populations and to determine how robotic assistance can be integrated into their work, we conducted a field study using ethnographic and co-design methods in a senior living community. From our results, we created a set of design opportunities for robotic assistance, which we organized into three different parts: supporting caregiver workflows, adapting to resident abilities, and providing feedback to all stakeholders of the interaction.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1925043
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10340527
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- DIS '22: Designing Interactive Systems Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1934 to 1947
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533536
