I-CARE-An Interaction System for the Individual Activation of People with Dementia

Abstract

I-CARE is a hand-held activation system that allows professional and informal caregivers to cognitively and socially activate people with dementia in joint activation sessions without special training or expertise. I-CARE consists of an easy-to-use tablet application that presents activation content and a server-based backend system that securely manages the contents and events of activation sessions. It tracks various sources of explicit and implicit feedback from user interactions and different sensors to estimate which content is successful in activating individual users. Over the course of use, I-CARE's recommendation system learns about the individual needs and resources of its users and automatically personalizes the activation content. In addition, information about past sessions can be retrieved such that activations seamlessly build on previous sessions while eligible stakeholders are informed about the current state of care and daily form of their protegees. In addition, caregivers can connect with supervisors and professionals through the I-CARE remote calling feature, to get activation sessions tracked in real time via audio and video support. In this way, I-CARE provides technical support for a decentralized and spontaneous formation of ad hoc activation groups and fosters tight engagement of the social network and caring community. By these means, I-CARE promotes new care infrastructures in the community and the neighborhood as well as relieves professional and informal caregivers.

Keywords: activation for people with dementia; intelligent services; professional and informal caregivers; recommendation system; technical assistance.

Figure 1

I-CARE tandem session session (Source: © AWO Karlsruhe gGmbH–a written informed consent was obtained from the individuals for the publication of this image).

Figure 2

I-CARE Activation Contents (left-hand side) and ratings (right-hand side).

Figure 3

The I-CARE system architecture.

Figure 4

Accumulated duration [hours] of I-CARE activation sessions in the evaluation study.

Figure 5

User Preferences over time of four individual tandems. Relative duration of activations as color bars and entropy as red line.

Figure 6

Content personalization with duration of usage with large interpersonal increases variances.

Figure 7

All types of content get mostly positive assessments, with games and audio achieving best marks on average.

Figure 8

Relative frequency of observed responses to activation material.

Figure 9

Different performance metrics for the comparison of Baseline Recommender and I-CARE recommender. (*) denotes a significant difference (p < 0.05), (**) denotes a highly significant difference (p < 0.001) difference.

Figure 10

Responses to final questionnaire at the end of the evaluation (n = 25) for persons with dementia (PwD) and Caregivers.