Alex Mihailidis, Ph.D.
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

2004 Everyday Technologies for Alzheimer Care Grant

Everyday tasks can be difficult for individuals with dementia because they may not remember the proper sequence of actions to complete a task or may not be able to identify the objects needed. Consequently, they often depend on caregivers to prompt actions or correct errors, and they may become upset by undertaking a task or feeling dependent.

Alex Mihailidis, Ph.D., and colleagues are designing an “intelligent environment” called the COACH, or Cognitive Orthosis for Assisting aCtivities in the Home. The system is intended to monitor the actions of an older adult with dementia during an activity of daily living and provide verbal and visual prompts when an error is made or the person seems to be confused.

Hand-washing will be the daily activity used for creating a prototype system. The current work is to design the three primary modules of the system: (1) the tracking module will use a network of cameras and action-monitoring software to determine the position of the person’s body and hands and to “decide” what the person is attempting to do; (2) the planning module will determine if each step of the task is being completed in the correct order and detect errors; (3) the prompting module will use data from the first two modules to determine what kind of prompting is appropriate.

Each module will be tested under controlled conditions in the laboratory, and the entire system will be tested with 10 participants with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease. The outcome of this research may demonstrate the potential of the technology to assist with a variety of everyday tasks, provide a degree of independence and alleviate behavioral problems.