Older adults are often faced with making decisions related to the healthcare such as determining which Medicare plan is right for them, whether they should purchase long-term care insurance, or if they should remodel their home to support their changing needs.  Such complex decision making can be supported through information guides, search tools, and advancements in technology such as artificial intelligence (AI).  We are exploring decision-support challenges as well as the potential benefits of various solutions through subject matter expert interviews, structured interviews with older adults, task analysis, human factors evaluation, archival data sets from our partners, and behavioral observations of older adults performing realistic tasks.​ Our aims include understanding the cognitive demands, facilitators, and individual difference predictors of decision-making challenges in healthcare-management activities. We will evaluate, with a diverse sample of older adults including those with mild cognitive impairment and lower socioeconomic status, the usability, acceptability, and efficacy of the digital assistant tools to support these activities.

Persons with cognitive impairment experience changes in one or more cognitive functions including memory, attention, language, executive function impacting their ability to independently carry out everyday activities. Advances in technology offer promising avenues to support them with these everyday activities provided these technologies are carefully designed to meet the unique needs and preferences of this population  The goal of this project is to develop and evaluate a program called SPARC: Supporting Personal Activities and Reinforcing Cognition.  SPARC is an intelligent adaptive system that will provide cognitive support, social support, and engagement with older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Speech data will be collected through a reminiscence feature to study how language production data can be used as an early indicator of cognitive decline.  We are following a user-centered design process that includes interviews with clinical advisors, focus groups with technology experts, and focus groups with older adults with MCI.  We will then field-test the usability and usefulness of SPARC for older adults in the community who have MCI.

Virtual reality (VR) systems provide an immersive and engaging experience that give users the realistic impression of being present in a context or situation outside their home, alone or with others. To date, few studies have examined usability and acceptance of VR applications or their efficacy with older adults or examined social or cognitive engagement applications. The purpose of this project is to evaluate and fill in crucial gaps in knowledge to ensure that individuals of all ages can use and benefit from emerging technologies to support important outcomes related to health, well-being, and cognition. The goal is to enable older adults to benefit from VR in their homes.  We will first examine usability and acceptance of VR applications by older adults to identify preferences for applications within the targeted four domains of the planned VRT CAST program: training and new learning, cultural opportunities, social support, and leisure opportunities.