Citation

Bouchard B, Bouchard K, Bouzouane A. J. Reliab. Intell. Environ. 2020; 6(2): 107-125.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s40860-020-00104-3

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In our ageing world, a rising number of people suffer from cognitive deficit, which most of the time leads to a reduced autonomy. Even with their impaired capacities, these persons often stay at home or they go live with a relative. They then have to perform important daily tasks (such as cooking) using devices and appliances designed for healthy people, which do not take into consideration their cognitive impairment. Using these devices is risky and may lead to a tragedy (e.g. fire). A potential answer to this challenge is to provide automated systems, which perform tasks on behalf of the impaired user. However, clinical studies have shown that encouraging users to maintain their autonomy greatly help to preserve health, dignity, and motivation. Therefore, we present in this paper a new smart range prototype allowing monitoring and guiding a cognitively impaired user in the activity of preparing a meal. This new original prototype is capable of giving adapted prompting to the user in the completion of several recipes by exploiting load cells, heat sensors and electromagnetic contacts embedded in the range. Our system is also able to detect risky situations and is able of taking preventive actions accordingly. It includes a state-transition recognition algorithm incorporating a model of the main cognitive errors. Finally, we present several experiments with the prototype and a study conducted with the targeted users, with companies, public organisms and professionals.

Language: en