Family members with a relative with dementia often face complex, and stressful life situations that many other caregivers do not. Multiple factors make the adjustment to the caregiving role particularly hard, as the caregiver balances this role with other demands, including child rearing, careers, and relationships. For people with dementia, perceptible capabilities, fundamental information-processing capabilities and previously acquired knowledge are generally limited, making it difficult to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information. Tasks such as making breakfast or teeth brushing may become too difficult to complete independently and an inability to remember events that occurred only a few days, hours, or even minutes previously makes day-to-day decision-making and navigating built environments difficult. The recall of routes and tasks may be unpredictable, therefore caregivers are often left with the constant and repetitive responsibility of prompting and cueing the care recipient, leading to additional stress in their caregiving role. This project aims to develop a low-cost wearable device to improve the quality and sustainability of dementia homecare that is beneficial to both care recipients and caregivers, and potentially create a new paradigm to provide assistance and care to individuals with dementia in a home environment. This innovative cognitive assistive technology, called CATcare, will be specifically designed to provide two-way assistance to the dementia caregiver and care recipient dyad living at home, enabling the individual with dementia more independence and situational awareness in the home setting, as well as improving his or her quality of life with less reliance on the caregiver. Caregivers, on the other hand, will be able to fully program, adjust, and customize the system for a given living environment according to the care recipient?s current habits, needs and conditions. This device can potentially prolong the period that the dementia patients stay at home and age in place, reducing the financial burden to both government and individuals as well as emotional and physical stress to caregivers. The proposed CATcare prototype not only encapsulates the newest hardware innovations (including smartglass and smartphone) but also advanced software solutions (including state-of-the-art image processing, machine learning, computer vision techniques). In conclusion, this project will lead to the integration and development of an affordable, portable and versatile wearable intervention to address the long-standing and fast-growing challenges facing current and future dementia homecare.
For individuals with dementia living at home, perceptible capabilities, fundamental information-processing capabilities and tasks such as making breakfast or teeth brushing may become too difficult to complete independently, leading to the responsibility of repetitive prompting and cueing by the caregiver. To improve the quality and sustainability of dementia homecare that is beneficial to both care recipients and caregivers, we propose to create an innovative wearable technology called CATcare which will be designed to provide navigational and cueing assistance to care recipients in the home environment. Our results will help provide a tool for two-way assistance by enabling caregivers to fully program, adjust and customize the system in order to support the individual with dementia with improved situational awareness and timely feedback in the home setting.
