Paper Info
Title
Designing Memory Aids for Dementia Patients using Earables
Abstract
ABSTRACTGlobally around 50 million people are currently living with dementia, and there are nearly 10 million new cases every year. The decline of memory and, with it, lack of self-confidence and continuous confusion have a devastating effect on people living with this disease. Dementia patients even struggle to accomplish mundane chores and require assistance for daily living and social connectedness. Over the past decade, we have seen remarkable growth in wearable technologies to manage our health and wellbeing and improve our awareness and social connectedness. However, we have to ask why wearables are not addressing this fundamental challenge of memory augmentation that threatens our society? Some limited existing work on cognitive wearables for dementia has focused on using images via camera-based life-logging technology. Instead, in this paper, we argue that earable - by virtue of its unique placement, rich sensing modalities, and acoustic feedback capabilities, uncovers new opportunities to augment human cognition to address this pressing need to assist dementia patients. To this end, we delve into fundamental principles of cognitive neuroscience to understand what constitutes memory disorder and its symptoms concerning errors in everyday activities. Building on this, we discuss the benefits of earables (in conjunction with smart objects) in modelling activity and intention of dementia patients and providing contextual memory cues. We put forward a guidance system to assist dementia patients with daily living and social connectedness.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3460418.3479324
Ubiquitous Computing
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
earables, dementia, cognitive impairment, memory aids
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Matija Franklin100.34
David A. Lagnado211925.65
Chulhong Min336230.13
Akhil Mathur410115.10
Fahim Kawsar590980.24