Cognitive Assistants—An Analysis and Future Trends Based on Speculative Default Reasoning

Abstract

Abstract:Once a person is diagnosed (or a caregiver suspects that the person may have) cognitive disabilities he may lose the state of being autonomous, which may range from partial to total loss of independence, according to the level of incidence. Smart houses may be used as a tentative solution to overcome this situation. However, when one goes outside their premises, this alternative may become unusable. Indeed, due to the decreased orientation ability, caregivers may prevent these people from going out, as they may get lost. Therefore, we are developing a system for people with mild or moderate cognitive disabilities that guides the user through an augmented reality interface and provides a localization tool for caregivers. The orientation method implements a speculative computation module, thus the system may calculate and anticipate possible user mistakes and issue alerts before he takes the wrong path. Through a trajectory mining module, the path is also adjusted to user preferences. These two modules enable the system to adapt to the user.

Multi-Agent Systems

“…Finally, the third work [24] presented CogHelper, which is an orientation system for people with cognitive disabilities. The main idea is that using this system, people with cognitive disabilities may have a more active life, reducing the worry of getting lost both indoors and outdoors.…”

Special Issue “Multi-Agent Systems”: Editorial

“…In [22] the authors develop a personal assistant agent leveraging and complementing ambient intelligence systems to safely navigate people with cognitive disabilities in unfamiliar environments. The proposed system features location tracking, an orientation system, and speculative reasoning to enable monitoring of patients' locations by caregivers and relatives, increase autonomy of patients, and pro-actively detect potential mistakes leading to the patient getting lost.…”

A Conceptual Approach to Enhance the Well-Being of Elderly People

“…We believe these three areas of artificial intelligence are essential to define a personalized approach to correctly support elderly people and motivate them to pursuit healthier lifestyle habits. For this, cognitive assistants can provide tools and features to help people perform activities of daily living [14]. Furthermore, these assistants will interact directly with the user using different mechanisms such as affective wearables to collect physiological data and correctly assess user's affective states and gamification to motivate the user to perform different activities and improve health condition.…”

“…Furthermore, the authors also concluded that the developed system should never replace the caregiver but act as a complementary to the work of the caregivers instead. Ramos et al [14] proposed a system using a smartphone and augmented reality to guide people with mild or moderate cognitive disabilities according to their preferences and offers an application that allows the caregiver to locate the disabled person. The developed system also considered ethical questions since it collects and ciphers sensitive data and assumes the disabled person has given his/her consent to provide all the information necessary for the system to operate correctly.…”