Research

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.